


We've Already Left

by BatailleEye



Category: The 1975 (Band)
Genre: Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Art, Blow Jobs, Crying, Declarations Of Love, Desire, Dirty Talk, Drinking, Drug Use, Emo, Love Letters, M/M, Masturbation, Metaphysical Concepts Of Paradise, Nostalgia, Proust, Riding, Rimming, Semi-Public Sex, Sharing Clothes, Unsafe Sex, Watching, soft
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-30
Updated: 2016-10-28
Packaged: 2018-07-19 07:41:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 26,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7352074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BatailleEye/pseuds/BatailleEye
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They did it all the time when they were younger. Like a dream they both shared but couldn’t make lucid, it lived in a foggy and surreal past. They never discussed those curious evenings, that tentative longing, but neither forgot the furtive touches and the way they lived inside each other’s heads, learning about desire.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. begin

They did it all the time when they were younger. Kissing in darkened corners at crowded house parties. Touching themselves side by side in Matty’s oversized bed, shitty porn on the laptop between them. Matty -- already exhibiting a writer’s flair -- telling George dirty stories in the dark, his hard dick pressed into George’s warm back as he whispered about the salty taste of warm skin and the feel of another’s heartbeat, not quite your own but not quite foreign either while George, silently, eyes closed, rubbed himself off. After graduation it stopped. Like a dream they both shared but couldn’t make lucid, it lived in a foggy and surreal past. They never discussed those curious evenings, that tentative longing, but neither forgot the furtive touches and the way they lived inside each other’s heads, learning about desire. 

//

 _I’m always working on the album_ \-- it was a Matty-ism, a phrase he coughed up on command whenever he was asked about his creative process or where the band was headed next or even what he did during those countless hours trapped on a tourbus. But tonight he and George really were working on the album, their first night in a studio in ages. 

Matty kept George’s demos on his phone for months, jotting down lines at dinner tables, the backseat of cabs, and once after a bit of one of George’s melodies came to him while he hurled up the last of the previous night’s liquor. His pocket notebook was half filled with scattered memories and painful wish fulfillment, all the revelations of the past year burnt into the pages. It was time to fit their visions together and Matty felt nervous energy darting around his stomach and pushing into his chest. He was anxious about cracking his life open, revealing the little bits and pieces that clung to him, fixing his runny insides to George’s colorful musical blur. Once done, there was no way to separate the two and some part of himself was forever given over to George and vice versa. Through each swat of the shuttlecock the two built an escape that was so intertwined it belonged to neither; songs they turned over to the public, confessionally referring to them as “the soundtrack to our lives,” though they were more precisely a sonic recreation of a memory they made up together. Nerve wracking.

Matty picked up the same wild tension in George. His eyes were fiery, burrowing into Matty, excited to fling the doors open. The studio was a friend of a friend’s, a glorified soundproofed closet where they could spend the night working up demos. The control room was long and narrow with low lamp lighting that glowed orange against the hardwood floors and creamy walls. There was one rolling chair, which George took, proceeding to set up his laptop. Matty flopped down on the beat up leather couch behind him, still close enough to push the chair around with his feet. Struck with that familiar impulse and unable to set it aside, he shoved George left and shot him a devious smile when George spun around with a sharp “Matthew!” Matty popped up to continue the game as George quickly slid right with a giggling, “Don’t, though,” putting his hands up in defense as Matty moved to pounce. 

Instead he turned to the laptop and mumbled, “This one, I think?” as he selected a track. The control room flooded with sound, and George rolled himself toward Matty, laughing riotously as he collided with his shins, causing Matty to fall backwards into his lap. “George,” Matty groaned, drawing it out in playful exasperation, resting his head on George’s shoulder and smiling up at him, unable to smooth all the hesitation out of his face. He moved to stand back up but George held him close. 

“Sit here,” he said. Matty stayed seated, legs splayed by George’s knees, not because this was how they usually began piecing songs together but because their working relationship, their entire friendship, was built around an unquestioned acceptance of all suggestions. Matty reached a hand behind himself and pulled his notebook from the pocket of his designer jeans, brand new for the special occasion. Leaning back against George’s chest, he opened to a middle page and outlined his idea. He described hearing the low intensity of pale, mid-morning sunlight and how he was reminded of the ache he felt at rest stops during long drives through Nowhere, America. In his oversized hoodie and with George’s arms wrapped around his waist, Matty was encircled in a comforting warmth. He sang, “A hand on your shoulder/ come over” tracing his fingers under the words on the page, then skipping down a few lines “The sun sets purple here/ but we’ve already left.” Between the two lines he’d written “dreaming of the past again” and “homesick.” Matty dated each page in uncharacteristic organization and he recognized the one at the top as the week they’d spent in London that April. London was home, maybe he’d been thinking of Manchester. 

He turned his head up to face George, eyes round and pleading for approval. “What do you think?” he asked. George didn’t have to answer, Matty could read the look on his face, wolfish and roving. And he never did formally reply, instead reaching over Matty to rearrange part of the track and announce,

“There, go again.” Matty repeated the bit, layering “is there anything left?” over the last line. 

“Yeah?” George asked and Matty nodded. “Better, right?” Matty nodded again, moving his pen across the page to note the two vocals. They continued in this rhythm, cobbling the song together like a thousand piece puzzle, each took turns adjusting the levels and pulling the track tighter, George offering esoteric musings on Matty’s lyrics. The process was slow but hours piled up without either taking notice until finally the chorus snapped into place. Matty tossed his notebook to the floor and looked up to George, nodding his head. George’s reaction was equally instant, pulling back from the laptop and locking his eyes on Matty. They’d maintained their intimate seating arrangement the whole time and this observation seemed to dawn on them at the same moment, how tactile and inseparable they were. Matty grabbed George’s thighs and squeezing them asked, “Wine? And a joint?” George offered his silent agreement, but Matty stayed seated a few seconds longer, hands still gripping George’s legs. Finally he mumbled, mostly to himself, “Ok. Ok,” and stood up to rummage through his backpack, producing the rewards. 

Matty curled up on the couch, twisting the cap off the bottle, and motioned for George to join him. He sat close to Matty, their knees knocking together as each shifted to face the other. “I think we’ve got that one. It’s sounding really, really good like we’ve realized it or actualized it and I can lay down a proper vocal when we’re done, but, yeah?” Matty rambled as George lit the joint and took a long drag. George nodded as he held the smoke in his lungs, added only a raspy yeah and a small cough to the conversation, passed the joint to Matty and motioned for the wine bottle. They swapped, their hands brushing together in the exchange, George’s long fingers wrapping gently around Matty’s small hand. He outlined some of his other ideas, how a big, sweeping instrumental might work as a rumination on humanity and how a particularly glowing and pulsing track felt synced to his heartbeat during sex. George offered little more than his facial expressions in response, but they were enthusiastic, like these thoughts were lighting him from within. George leaned slightly forward, dug an elbow into his thigh, rested his chin in his palm and listened intently as Matty talked. 

By virtue of his frequent silence, George drank more of the wine -- not enough for his head to loll or a slur creep into his voice, but enough for his eyes to glitter and his shoulders to relax towards Matty, freed from the weight of the outside world, existing only in this perpetual instant. George raised the wine bottle from between his legs to take another sip but it was too light to be anything other than empty and he set it on the floor. He paused there, looking down contemplatively, Matty only able to see the outline of his face from that angle. When he sat back up he kept his eyes downcast and ran a hand along Matty’s thin leg. “These are nice,” he said, his voice hitting a note that sounded almost like confusion to Matty, as though George wasn’t sure what he was saying or why. But George didn’t pull his hand away either, he continued to stroke slowly up and down Matty’s thigh. 

Matty left his eyes on George but observed him in a distant way, feeling almost outside his own body, or as if he was about to float away but George’s hand on his leg tethered him to the room and to the night. Any closer, Matty realized, and he’d want to lock eyes with George, to peer inside him and uncover his memories like brushing off a dusty piano bench and playing a scale, something once rigorously learned and tested only to be locked in an untouched chest. He wanted to hold George under his spell long enough to taste him. Matty was aware, that night and every other, of his constant need to assert his will, to overtake situations and let his desire dictate his actions no matter the consequences. But he never carelessly seduced George, he never wanted him just for the thrill of having him. Then, as now, it was always George who pulled Matty in, eyes flickering with tangled lust and fear. Instead of entrancing George with the wild swirl of his craving, Matty realized he’d entranced himself and was lost in the maze of his thoughts. The studio snapped back into focus, George’s hand still heavy on his thigh, the smell of smoke still heavy in the air. 

“Thanks, they’re new,” Matty finally replied with a smile that crinkled the bridge of his nose, summoning all his energy to push the words outside his head. His eyes briefly lowered to George’s hand but moved back up as the haze wore off. They hit George’s face and he raised his hand to Matty’s neck and leaned in close, taking Matty’s lower lip with his teeth and sucking on it, forcing a small gasp from Matty’s throat. George ran his tongue over Matty’s lip and then pulled away, admiring how his mouth gleamed in the halflight as he fumbled for an apology. “I’m not sure what that--” he managed to mumble before Matty pulled him in again, sliding his back down the couch so George hovered over him, his weight in his wrists. 

“I’ve _missed_ you,” Matty said, eyes softly closed, desiring nothing more than to wrap his arms around George’s waist and hold him close. “So much,” his soft eyes then open and shimmering as Matty tipped his head forward. George let his arms bend at the elbow and lowered himself on top of Matty, kissing his neck and jawline lightly. 

“You didn’t,” George grinned, pressed his lips to Matty’s, soft and warm and wet, felt their tongues meet and breathed in deeply, the smell of red wine, dark and slightly fruity spilling from their open mouths. 

“I did, George,” Matty said, brows knitted, gravely serious, searching George’s face for any sign of recognition as his head sunk back into the armrest. Matty thought George must have known all those years. He could have had him any time he wanted, but George never did have him. The split second of shock that passed over his face told Matty he never knew he could. 

“I felt you disappear, slowly at first, until every last bit of you vanished, and when you came back you were different, _you_ were gone,” George said, the long thought pouring from him so effortlessly that it indicated years of practice and reflection to build to this recital. A thought that had roots in George. In the silence that followed he looked at Matty almost cautiously, almost like he was holding a piece of antique porcelain over a high balcony, before taking Matty’s face in both his hands and pulling his head up from the back of the couch. “I’m not going anywhere,” he whispered, lips brushing against Matty’s as he formed the words, and then he kissed him deeply, holding him still as their faces pressed together and he sucked at Matty’s tongue. “I’m not going anywhere,” he rasped again and this time it was Matty, pushing his hips up hard and wrapping a leg around him, who kissed George, a memory that ached. Matty held him so close the moment felt never ending. 

Only then, finally able to undo each button on George’s soft cotton shirt, did Matty realize he carried the dull pain of longing for George with him everywhere he went. It all came back to him so quickly -- the way George liked to be kissed, slow and lingering, the way he trembled when Matty sucked at his neck and pressed his tongue against the tender mark left by his teeth. In this moment, tongue firm in the crook of George’s neck, Matty remembered the last time. His bedroom was hot, late June, and the sheets stuck to their bodies, bare skin sticky and sweaty. He wanted more but he gave less, pulling away and burying his face in George’s chest, a feeling like sadness but more distant welling up inside him. He pushed it away but couldn’t bring himself closer, couldn’t pick his head up, couldn’t look at George. That night George kissed the top of his head, his hair cut sporty and short and boyish and so unlike him, and murmured goodnight. That was how it ended. 

Matty moved back to George’s mouth, giving him a sweet and delicate kiss, tenderly lacing his tongue through George’s lips and running his hand down George’s broad back, already humid under his open shirt. He slid a hand under George’s waistband, feeling his muscles tense as he reached around and rested his hand on his belt buckle. Matty’s heart raced, drawing such a lurid and immediate and undeniable response from George. His tongue in George’s mouth, he moaned softly, pressing his hips into George’s and pulling at his belt for leverage. George groaned back, one hand tangled in Matty’s hair, fingers tightened around the black curls to tip his head back, exposing the whole of his neck. George ran his tongue from Matty’s collarbone to his jaw, sending tremors through his body, and he felt Matty reflexively buck his hips again. 

George pushed Matty’s face to the side, kissed the sensitive spot where his jawline met his neck, sultry, open mouth kisses, George’s tongue pressed into Matty’s nerve endings. Matty remembered this, too, in a surge of almost overwhelming desire. Eyes shut tight, fingers wound through George’s belt loops, Matty angled into George’s tongue, urgent and desperate. The sound of George’s hot, ragged breath was loud in Matty’s ears. He focused on George’s exhalations just beneath his ear, heard the way George held the air inside him like a guarded secret and the way he let it out like a whispered truth. Matty loosened his hands and draped them over George’s back, underneath his shirt. 

“Come closer,” Matty mumbled, turning his head back to George and finding his lips, his tongue, his teeth gently tugging, every careful motion producing a heightened sensation. Matty kissed back eagerly. He pulled George flush against him and wrapped his arms tight, promising himself he’d never give this up again. He hitched his leg up, rubbing the inside of his thigh along George’s hip, his calf nudging George’s ass. George’s body tensed and arched in response and he pushed a low moan into Matty’s mouth. Matty lapped it up, pleased to have pulled the sound from his throat. Using his leg to hold him down, he ran his hands along George’s sides, sliding his fingers over his ribs and up his chest. He rounded George’s shoulders under the thin fabric of his shirt and pushed the material away, exposing the gentle slope of his bones and the colorful tattoo inked into his upper arm. He tilted his head to the side, admiring the way George’s damp skin glowed in the diffuse light. George smirked down at him and sucked at his lower lip. 

He pulled away with Matty’s lip still between his teeth, letting it loose with a soft snap and Matty felt George’s eyes gorge on his pouty face before kneeling back on his heels, tugging his shirt from his arms and tossing it in Matty’s face. Matty inhaled the scent of the top, a mix of arousal and George’s perfume, and was almost startled it didn’t have the same grassy, sunshine smell he remembered. His stomach turned and his thoughts raced. What he wanted was to be seventeen again, to pull his head from George’s chest and tell him he’d never leave him, to promise him everything. This wasn’t the day after, this wasn’t the promise he meant to keep. He felt the loss of all those years but he also felt a tiny flicker of hope, the shift of that weight inside him, a new smell, a new memory. He pulled the shirt off his face and tossed it on the floor. 

George leaned back into Matty and slid a hand under his hoodie, pressing against his soft stomach, fingertips just beneath the waistband of his tight black jeans, sending a shiver through the trail of fine hair leading down Matty’s torso. Then George ran his hand up Matty’s side, digging his fingers into Matty’s ribs and thumbing his nipple, a pressure that hurt a little and tickled a little and forced Matty to writhe into George, casting small whimpers into his mouth as they kissed. He wanted to stop time, to exist like this, fused to George and no longer himself, forever. Matty’s breath stopped, trapped inside him, a protest against waking up, against the worry of an uncertain future. 

Matty pulled his face from George’s, a desperate gasp escaping his throat, only to throw his face into George’s neck, feverishly nibbling his way to George’s jaw and working a hand against the front of George’s pants, tugging at his belt clumsily. Fingers on the other hand tangled in George’s coarse curls, Matty pushed George upright and leaned into his chest, kissing from shoulder to shoulder, sucking and biting at the salty skin. Something inside him felt snapped in half, recklessly burning anything he could touch for fuel. Insatiable.

George pushed his hands under Matty’s hoodie again, this time grabbing the plush fabric in his fists and lifting it over Matty’s head, midnight tendrils falling in a mess over his pretty face. Matty brushed the hair out of his eyes and arranged his legs around George’s waist, holding George’s hips between his thighs. He lowered his face to suck along George’s collarbone and smiled to himself when George let out a pleading moan. 

The thrill was short-lived, supplanted by panic when George interrupted the little wet noises Matty made along his shoulder by quietly saying, “It can’t be like it was.” Matty felt the blood rush to his stomach, like a colony of ants crawling under a crack in the baseboards. His hand moved from caressing George’s arm to covering George’s mouth; he shook his head in protest.

“It’s not like it was, George, it’s different,” he said, feeling George’s lips part around his fingers. “I’m not ‘fooling around,’ this isn’t my old bedroom,” he said, feeling George wrap his tongue around the first two fingers. “I want this, you,” he said, feeling George suck his fingers deep into his mouth and then let them slide back out, a trail of slick spit running down his chin. Matty stared at his wet fingers, so stunned he lost his thought and could only turn back to George and shove his tongue between his softly parted lips, groaning hotly into George’s mouth and grinding his hips into him, lamenting all the fabric between them.

“I didn’t say I wanted to stop,” George said, running a thumb along Matty’s swollen lower lip. His tongue slipped out to flick against the tip of George’s finger, his lips encircling it in a soft kiss. He tipped his eyes up to George, dark and wild -- he sensed the unstated challenge in George’s words and responded with his own wordless action. Holding George’s gaze, he undid his belt and zipper, roughly tugging George’s pants to his knees, sliding back and standing up as he worked the fabric down. George was hard, the head of his dick already glistening. 

Matty felt his mouth water, he wanted to look George in the face, he wanted to shoot him a self assured smile, but he couldn’t look away when he’d waited so long. He knelt between George’s knees -- spread as wide as he could manage -- and worked his hand around the base of his dick, stroking halfway up and down, savoring the image of George hard in his fist. When he’d looked his fill he lowered his face and softly kissed George, mumbling “Fuck, you’re so beautiful” like he’d never seen the leaves turn in autumn, like he’d never seen light dance along a riverbank. He’d never seen anything so beautiful. George moaned, overwhelmed by Matty’s wet lips pressed against his sensitive skin. Matty flicked his tongue out and licked George up, salty and earthy, then sucked him into his mouth, hollowing out his cheeks. Matty breathed in deeply through his nose; George was slightly pungent, like he hadn’t showered that day, like he wasn’t expecting this, and Matty felt himself stiff against his zipper with the rush of how quickly things had unfolded. 

“Fuck,” George cried, lowering a hand from behind his head to behind Matty’s head, petting his curls reassuringly. “You’re so soft,” he whispered more absentmindedly, lost in the reverie of Matty’s mouth. Matty swirled his tongue in tight circles and George instinctively tightened the fist in Matty’s hair, neither pushing his head down nor pulling it back, simply holding onto him with everything he had. Matty appreciated the fervent urgency, the way George needed him, the way he couldn’t let him go. It made him sloppy. Matty pushed down on George, taking him whole and letting him press into the back of his throat until he gagged, cheeks flushed and eyes wet with tears. For a split second Matty wanted to pull back, to tease more, but George groaned and panted and scratched at Matty’s head and he felt like when a particularly good line came to him. He moved his warm, wet hand to George’s balls and gently handled them. 

“Suck on them,” came George’s voice, throaty and hoarse. Matty pulled his dick out with a wet slurp, switching his mouth for his hand, thumbing over the tip of George’s dick while he sucked his balls. First one, then the other, then both, running his tongue over the groove between them. George’s breathing was heavy and rapid, his body tense against Matty’s free hand. “Make me cum,” he begged and Matty popped his balls out of his mouth and looked up with a sly expression, equal parts greed and impishness. 

“Say it again,” Matty teased, running the tip of his slender index finger along the underside of George’s dick. 

“Make me cum, Matty” George whimpered, practically breathless with desperation. Matty took him in halfway, using his damp hand for the rest. He left George gasping, barely able to pant out a loud “Fuck!” while cumming. With his lips wrapped tight around George’s dick he sucked the cum down his throat. 

Matty rocked back on his knees, face wet with saliva and George, and looked up with glazed eyes and a curling smirk. He put a hand to the side of his face to wipe his mouth clean, but before the back of his hand touched his lips George yanked him up by his shoulders and pulled him in, pushing his tongue into Matty’s softly opened mouth. Matty heard him inhale sharply, smelling himself all over Matty’s face. He ran his tongue up Matty’s chin and along his lower lip, kissing him again but slower, holding Matty’s lips in his. Matty felt George’s total concentration shoot through him; the moment felt like standing behind George and observing him take in a particular piece of art, the way he’d slip into a trance, limbs loose as the force of his body spun between his eyes and the opposite wall. Matty knew he was that portrait, that George was memorizing the feel of his sticky, tender face. Matty drew closer, climbing into George’s wet lap, wincing slightly at the way his jeans pressed against him. 

George pulled Matty tight to his chest, running his hand down Matty’s knotted spine. He arched his back more with each touch, anticipating George’s hand sliding down the back of his pants. It rested there, warm and steady, while George planted kisses on him, lining his imperial cheekbone and down his neck. Matty groaned receptively and pressed his hips into George’s, trying futilely to spread his legs even a centimeter wider, but the sensation was overwhelming and Matty gasped, rolling his eyes slightly and throwing his head back. He wanted to tear his own pants off but he wanted George to tear his pants off even more. 

George straightened him upright, tipping his chin down so Matty watched him lick his tongue up his chest. He ran his free hand from Matty’s shoulder, tracing down the outside of his slim arm, and dragging his fingertips along Matty’s palm, intertwining their hands, and pulling Matty’s wrist to his lips and kissing it delicately. It struck Matty as courtly or Shakespearian and he blushed. George turned his face to meet Matty’s and placed an almost absentminded kiss on his pouty lips. His movements were all languid and sustained and dreamy and Matty, passionate and frustrated, bit George’s lip in return. He sucked at the coppery taste and admired the sweet way George’s lower lip now protruded from his face. Matty kissed him roughly, groaned and thrusted, needy for attention. His eyes spun to the shadows along the ceiling, sharp angles pouring from the muted lighting. George gripped Matty’s hand tighter, pressing his fingers down until their palms were flush. Matty’s whole torso felt hot with desperation; he was desperate to feel George, desperate to know George wanted him, too. Unable to wait any longer, he pulled George’s hand around his waist and pushed it down the front of this pants. 

The moment felt electric. George held Matty tight in his fist, staring at him with a startling intensity and Matty broke the gaze, closing his eyes and letting the relief of George’s firm touch wash over him. When he opened his eyes George was relaxed against the couch, settling back and working his hand over his dick in slow strokes, keeping Matty hard but craving more. He tried to arch into George’s rhythm, but as soon as he lifted his ass off George’s thighs George pulled his hand out of Matty’s pants and licked the wetness from his fingers. 

Matty collapsed on George’s chest, a sad, silent heap. George’s hands were in Matty’s hair, ruffling his curls, as he quietly demanded, “Beg for it.”

Without lifting his head, Matty rolled his eyes at George’s turnabout and mumbled into his chest, “Please suck me off, George.” 

“Look at me and say it, Matty,” came George’s words as he wrapped a tendril of hair around his index finger.

Matty petulantly pushed his balled fists into George’s chest and lifted himself up. He blinked slowly, sucked his teeth impetuously and finally looked at George and said, “Please suck me off, please.” The two immediately crashed into each other, tongues curving, teeth gnashing. George pulled at his buckle and button and fly, getting Matty’s dick out and then just as suddenly as he’d frantically pawed at Matty he reverted to calmly stroking him up and down. Too gentle, another tease. Matty felt wild with urgency, pressing into every movement, pleading to be handled. 

Matty made a needy face and a small whimper and George relented, grabbing him by his hips and pushing him to the side, tugging his pants halfway down his thighs. He stopped to run his hand over the side of Matty’s ass admiringly but the whimpers began again, Matty seemingly on the verge of a tantrum over George’s infinite tease. George pushed him back against the couch cushions and knelt on the floor, prompting a sigh of relief from Matty. 

The feel of his soft, slick tongue was more intoxicating than Matty had even imagined and his hips jumped from the couch as an excited moan escaped his lips. He was already close to orgasm, having withstood all of George’s teasing, but determined to last, to soak up every twist of George’s tongue. George curled his tongue under and sucked Matty’s dick into the back of his mouth, letting Matty fuck against his throat until he tasted his cum, hot and slightly bitter. Matty felt George pull away carefully, his thighs still shaking slightly, and watched George’s eyes move from his flushed chest to his ruddy cheeks. He sprawled there, dazed and immobile, unable to think or speak. 

George stood up, pulling his pants over his ass but leaving them lazily undone, and dropped down to the couch, scooping Matty on top of him. Matty struggled with his pants, sliding them most of the way on before giving up and burying his head against George’s side. He wanted to say that he loved him, but not in that trite way, not in those three words, not with his cum still on George’s breath. He wanted it to mean something, to mean not just I love you right now, I love that you sucked my dick, but to mean I’ve always loved you, I always will love you. While Matty’s thoughts spun, George kissed the top of his head and murmured goodnight, his chest rising and falling with the weightlessness of sleep.


	2. again

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Matty gets a little emo and there's more sex. Most of what should be said out loud remains unspoken.

There’s very much a sublime beauty to Matty, with his glossy, unkempt hair and his straight, heavy eyebrows that cast everything beneath them in mystery and depth. His sublimity is only heightened by the seeming fragility of his body, the way his hands meet his arms at wrists so slender they appear paper thin and the way his skinny legs jut from his hips like wild branches in winter. But anyone who’s seen Matty lurch onto George’s bass drum -- knees bent, back bent, arms flying -- and hammer out the noisy breakdown in “Sex” knows he’s shatter proof. His bones have a tensile strength beyond carbon and he’s capable of great flail without fall. Stirred awake by nothingness one night, curled up in a darkened corner of the bus, it struck Matty that this was his Faustian deal. A body hardened to the whims of the world for an internal chaos, a constellation of thoughts too sprawling ever to fit comfortably inside him. 

//

_Norway. Mid-December. Darkness instead of daylight. The European tour. A six week grind through the cold and gloom before we decamp to paradise, Southern California._

Matty appreciated the mental rigor of a life unlit, dragged through each day guided only by the strobing stage set up and the dressing room fluorescents and the track lights along the floor of the bus. The sun, or its absence, served as an invisible bond between him and everybody he encountered, and it humbled him, and -- he paused to quickly calculate -- it was only forty-four hours since the plane landed and he was already totally fucking miserable. He let his chest cave, admitting to himself that the past week was grueling and that he was exhausted and without a chance to think -- though, that last part, maybe he didn’t mind that too much. One week had passed, one week filled with unvoiced questions that Matty refused to let his mind finish for fear that they’d spill from him unconsciously and take them both by the throat. Catching George kneel down at the mini-fridge from over a worn pulp paperback, his eyes moved backwards up the page and then off the page to puzzle over the way George dwarfed everything around him, from the small appliance to the bottle of water he pulled from inside. There was a thought somewhere in this frozen moment, a question he wanted to ask George but his mind slammed shut at “What is?” 

_Happening between us_. He startled awake, damp with sweat and on the verge of tumbling out of his bus cocoon. It was unusual for him to feel anything other than a supremely lock and key comfort sleeping in a bunk that accommodated him just so, but on this night his restless waking thoughts overtook the routine certainty of having only an inch or two to roll in either direction. They’d fought themselves free, demanded an answer. But he didn’t have one. He crossed his arms defensively, as if to suggest to himself, “Fuck if I know either, ask him!” 

The tour bus was never _pitch_ black, but this had always bothered George much more than Matty. Even as his thoughts continued to twist back to George like an unbreakably steely infinity loop he quieted the spiral by insisting to himself the problem was that he needed total darkness to sleep. But no matter how stubbornly he tried to satisfy himself with easy explanations, every neural pathway led to their evening in the studio or the staticky silence at the airport or earlier that afternoon when George grabbed a water bottle and sat down on the sofa across from Matty. 

He’d tried to appear absorbed in his book for as long as possible, but an eternity had not passed before he held his place with his finger and looked at George, a spectrum of expression passing over his face that began with steady seriousness and ended in lilting flirtation when Matty announced, all petulance, “your lips are chapped.” He smiled, a bit proud of himself. George ran his thumb over his mouth and agreed, but so mildly that Matty understood he didn’t care, hadn’t noticed, wasn’t important. Matty cringed involuntarily then pasted a wan smile over his embarrassment and meant to shake to his head inwardly, but that, too, slipped out without his intention. He’d hoped for a little sneering sarcasm from George, a quick “because of you!” which was the obvious truth Matty meant to provoke and which would lead to more kissing and more chapped lips, but George returned to scrolling through his phone. 

Matty observed him surreptitiously from behind the paperback, rationing his glances so that each page finished was a chance to take him in. He kept a list committed to memory, waiting for George to wander off so he could add it to his notebook. _One cocked eyebrow, eyelids heavy, hair foaming from head in wicked gnarls that beg to ensnare my fingers and reveal themselves a complicated juxtaposition of silky softness and fisherman’s knots. Same t-shirt three days, still white and still blinding, do I touch his shoulder? Does he remember?_

The last thought drowned out all the others. Matty remembered, he remembered he said, “I want you, this,” with his fingers in George’s mouth, the closest he’d ever come to saying forever. Did George remember? He rolled over in his bunk, accepting his sleepless fate. He couldn’t let himself put it into words but he’d been peering through a tiny sliver of his drawn curtains at a narrow patch of the floor willing George’s feet to appear before him. With every memory his brain dragged through his body hope pooled in his stomach that his imagined George might become flesh and the breath he held for him might be released. After settling on his opposite side he heard the rustle of bed sheets across the aisle. George must have been awake, too. 

This had happened once before, during the last week of their senior year. Matty woke in the middle of the night after he had too much to drink and thought he might be sick. The bed spun a little while he tried to decide whether to go to the bathroom or go to sleep. As he pressed his eyes shut with determination he felt George’s hand on his back, rubbing soothing circles. Matty had barely moved but his need for comfort was so strong and George so connected to it that he’d stirred awake all the same. That night he wanted to thank George, and when the nausea passed, he wanted to pull his arm around his side, intertwine their fingers and press George’s hand to his stomach so he could feel it was calmed. 

Tonight he wanted George to climb into his bunk and wedge himself in, forcing his knees to his chest to fit them both in a space too small for George alone. He wanted their limbs locked together and George’s face pressed to his shoulder. He wanted a hand in his hair, half stroking and half scratching, and he wanted an arm pulling his body so close that it felt like they were sharing the same breath. George would understand too tight was the only way to hold each other and he wouldn’t let Matty move. Matty instinctively curled himself against the wall in anticipation.

Then Matty imagined it reversed, he’d climb into George’s bunk and stick his knees between George’s legs and hold his hands against George’s chest and pull their bodies so close there would be no room for air to share. “I’m ok,” he’d whisper in George’s ear, “I can hold you.” This would be enough. He wouldn’t need to ask questions or wait for answers. George would understand and he’d move his hands over Matty’s, clasping them tight and pulling him to his lips and kissing Matty’s soft palms. “I’m ok, too,” he’d whisper back, “I can hold you, too.” They wouldn’t need to move or sleep, they’d share the same thoughts. 

It’s not George crawling into bed with him but their tour manager’s hand on his foot, shaking his leg and shouting “Wake up, Matty!” in his face that puts an end to his uneasy night. He’s lost, disoriented. 

“What time is it?” Matty rasped, sitting up and rubbing his face.  
“Three.”  
“Morning?”  
“Afternoon.”  
“Fuck.”  
“ _Shut up_. Get out of bed. You soundcheck in an hour.” Matty’s head thumped against the pillow. “No,” came the stern reply and he dragged Matty by his leg until he was forced to stand upright or fall on the floor and, satisfied that Matty was awake, he took off for the back of the bus. 

Feet on the ground, shoulders forward, forehead resting on his hands, fingers scratching at his dirty hair, the feel of George’s tongue -- on him, in him, everywhere -- came rushing to Matty like some kind of ruthless mirage. He felt George’s arm around his waist from last night’s dream, pulling him tight and begging him not to move. He pulled his jeans from the floor, slid them over his hips and fell back on the mattress, pushing his hand down the unzipped front of his pants and holding himself, concentrating hard on the only thought in his head: _I want you_. George’s lips wrapped around him. _I want you_. George’s hands on his face. _I want you_. George’s cum in his mouth. _I want you. I want you. I want you_. He heard distant footsteps as release flooded his body. “Matty! Hurry the fuck up!” 

He showered quickly, satiated but a little emptied, put on clean pants and a t-shirt and peered at his sallow reflection in the tiny, steamed up bathroom mirror. His damp curls were flat and lifeless and he felt no different inside. _I want you but you're not mine_ , he thought, trying to twist the knife, trying to be as cruel to himself as he possibly could. Matty knew other lovers waited much longer; he remembered Orpheus and Euridyce and as he emerged from the bathroom he spotted George in the communal seating area -- _same shirt four days more blinding more white_. He couldn’t stop himself from staring George down, mild panic dragging his eyebrows in a subtle v-shape, until he was sure George was not about to vanish a second time. 

“What?” George asked, eyes narrow, brow furrowed, shaking his head slightly as if to suggest _What’s wrong with you?_ before losing his air of confrontation and collapsing in a fit of giggles. 

It’s the first bit of affection he’s showed in days and Matty happily plopped next to him and offered a shrugging “Nothing!” 

“I had you going though,” George grinned and dug his elbow into Matty’s ribs. It felt like ecstasy. 

“Why are you still here?” Matty asked, crossing his legs toward George, sighing and lazily fluffing his hair while examining his stern reflection in the mirrored wall. He pulled his hair up and tied it in a knot, straightening his spine and admiring the angles in his face, the way dark circles had settled somewhat permanently under his eyes, giving him the look of the perpetually wearied and troubled. He caught George’s reflection, watching him watch himself, and he turned to face him, all his features softening with an acute, precise sadness. _You want me_. 

“I couldn’t fall asleep all night. Must’ve been six or something when I did. This country’s fucking with me.” The bus pulled up to the arena and Matty was relieved to abandon this line of conversation, to forget the sting and burn and thrill of George’s arm against his side and the cold confirmation that they had both laid awake, parallel lines, and shared the same thought but never once touched. 

Though on time and otherwise there, Matty was distant throughout soundcheck, wearing a pensive face that suggested _I’m just going through motions and using this time to work out something more important_. If it were anyone else, Matty wouldn’t stand for this back and forth. He’d have his way or he’d walk away but he wouldn’t lose entire days to fitting his head inside this uncertain space. But he couldn’t have his way with George. Couldn’t burden him like this. 

He felt that dull ache, the one he’d spent a decade perfecting, spreading through his chest as he contemplated sneaking a look at George while the soundcheck wound down. A small corner of his mind begged him not to, insisted it was a mistake to complicate an already complicated internal battle with a glance that was sure to leave him with the sensation of having accidentally stared into the abyss. So he did it. George was giggling, pointing a drumstick at Ross like a ballplayer calling his shot before hammering out a particularly silly solo, leaving them both doubled over laughing. 

“So talented!” Ross shouted at the back of the stage.

“Fuck off!” came George’s reply, followed by another round of racket. Just like the abyss, Matty looked a second too long and what was previously a perfectly routine unrequited longing mutated into something hot and childlike -- jealousy. He glared at Ross as he turned back to his mic stand. Easy for him to joke around with George. His regret was instantaneous and he winced down at his boots. _Get a grip, Healy_. To his right, Adam was noodling on his guitar. 

“Play that again,” Matty called out over the persistent giggling. 

“What?” Hann mouthed back, almost inaudible.

“That riff you were doing, play it again,” Matty yelled back louder.

Hann played what he’d worked out and after four bars Matty jumped in with a counter riff. 

“That’s pretty good,” Matty shouted, face glowing. “Can you tape it and send it to me?” Hann nodded in agreement and Matty walked off the stage, pointedly back in his own little world, one without the chorus of George’s giggles or the particular way the stage lights caught the sheen of his skin and made him look like an editorial Martian. His face fell into what he believed was a look of practiced neutrality but which was, in fact, a bit frowning and pensive. The crew knew not to expect much of him when he was in this fog and everyone was trained to stay out of his way when a mood took hold. Hurrying down the steps, he was content that they’d accomplished something but even more content that he could spend the hours leading up to the show fitting Hann’s riff into one of their demos. 

Knees bent together, shoulders hunched forward and eyes dancing back and forth across a laptop screen, Matty was too distracted to sense George’s presence the very moment he entered the room. He didn’t hear George’s small cough, he didn’t see George walk past him, nothing was strong enough to tear him away from his work until George dropped down on the couch next to him, so close that their thighs brushed together. With that touch, all the air left the room and Matty’s breath caught in his throat, his heart beat a measure faster than it had a second earlier, and, though he was silently cursing his unreliable chemistry and begging it not to tip his hand, a blush spread across his cheeks. Seemingly much more at ease, George relaxed into the back of the couch and Matty watched him breathe in deeply and tilt his head up. 

“Where is everyone?” Matty asked, setting his laptop on the floor and slowly coming back to Earth.

“Went to eat,” George replied flatly, staring at the ceiling. Matty looked away from his laptop and at him, saying nothing, but searching his face. Matty’s expression -- worried eyes, upturned brows, pursed lips -- suggested, he hoped, that George should ask him what he was thinking. _You won’t tell me what you’re feeling, so why don’t you ask me what I’m feeling_ , he thought. George’s head didn’t move from its resting place. 

“Hmm,” Matty sighed, staring down at the worn leather couch cushions, the sort that would forever carry a vague familiarity for both of them. He watched George’s hand slide over to his and trace his index finger down the side of Matty’s hand, lifting his pinky and hooking their fingers together. 

“What are we doing, Matty?” he mumbled.

Despite fantasizing about this, dreaming about this, and even moments earlier silently begging George to ask him this, he was suddenly at a loss for words, unable to communicate the strange way his head had buzzed the past few days or how every time George’s name came to him from the depths of his brain his chest burned like it was it was trying to find the antidote to some virulent poison in his blood. In a flurry of confusion, all he could offer was “I don’t know.” 

“I want to kiss you again” George said quietly, running his thumb over their interlocked fingers.

“Are you asking me? Don’t ask me,” came Matty’s solemn response. “I should be the one asking you. Kiss me if you want to, then.”

George leaned forward, lifting his head from the couch and taking Matty’s face in his hand, and slowly and softly and tenderly kissed him. Matty swore that time moved twice as slow then, that at death he will have lived exactly 10 seconds longer than he was allotted. 

When the kiss ended George pulled away and asked “What did you mean you should be asking me?” 

Matty stalled for a moment before replying, using the time not to arrange his words into a precise and crafted sentence, but to wind his fingers through George’s, to do for George what he’d done so many times for him and simply take his hand. Before he answered George he looked from their hands to his face and smiled, that crinkly nosed smile, the one that said no matter what happens next, how I feel about you will never change. And finally, out of room to maneuver, Matty exhaled, “because it’s not what I said before. It’s not just what I said before.” He reflected for a moment and then corrected himself, “No, it’s not anything I said before. ‘I want you’ was much too simple.” He climbed gingerly into George’s lap and sat still, looking George over for a reaction. 

George bit his lip and his eyes went hazy for a minute. Matty felt vertiginous, like time was melting and he was coming unglued. It came to him. 

There was a party, years ago, in late autumn when the weather was no longer crisp but turning chilly and they’d sat outside, him and George, trading cigarettes and sips of a made up drink strong enough to strip wallpaper. 

“We’re gonna go somewhere. I know it. This town’s too small for us,” Matty’s voice shook with conviction and cold and he sniffled performatively. They’d had this conversation once a week since they were twelve.

“Oh yeah?” George teased, “Where’re we gonna go? Weekend in London? Train to Paris?”

“Fuck off! We’re good, George. I’m not the only one who thinks so,” Matty added the last bit with an air of floating mystery.

“You’re so full of shit and capital-R Romanticism.”

“ _Very_ good one, that’s _very_ good,” Matty clutched at his chest, feigning a flesh wound. “Going to English? Skipping your smoke by the field house?” 

“No!” George gasped in mock horror, “I’d never!” He laughed and then softened, “I’ve been listening to _you_. Remember? When you told me you needed to confront the limits of your existence. You said ‘Capital-R Romanticism, George. I need to push myself off a cliff and watch myself fall.’ It was foggy that morning and you said you were going to ditch so you could feel awe.”

“You’re a dick, George.”

“For remembering?”

“For quoting me back to me.” Matty turned away and smiled to himself, hoping George hadn’t caught his private delight. “What else did I say?”

“Oh, let’s see, then you told me how I’m always right about everything and how I’m the smartest person you know and how I’m not supposed to let you get away with any of the daft things you say, especially when you’re acting like an egomaniac at a house party.” 

“It’s true I did say that, didn’t I?”

George had closed his eyes and in the darkness he trembled slightly, wrapping his coat tight against his chest and pulling his chin down under his collar. Matty rocked back on his elbows and stared into the distance. A silence had set in and it was George who broke the spell, asking “What are you thinking?”

The answer came quickly, without any thought. “Will you stay out here with me? Until the sun comes up?” Matty’s face had contorted into an exaggerated pout to conceal the real pleading in his request. Instead of placating Matty with words or laughing off his heady confusion with a straightforward, “Yes” George sat back up and put an arm around Matty’s waist and held it there. When the sun rose, too few hours later, the magic and the alcohol had worn away and his arm, once a symbol of great meaning, was displaced with a yawning, “I want to sleep in my bed.” These words were an invitation, a clipped version of a longer declaration, never once spoken aloud but always understood, that went _I want you to sleep in my bed with me_. Dawn’s faded indigo behind him, Matty had smiled down at George and offered him his hand. George bit his lip. 

_I want to give myself to you_. Matty’s mind returned to the present. Without clarifying the point further or even smiling in acceptance, George took Matty’s hands in his and pulled them around his waist. Matty instinctively wrapped his arms tighter, clasping his hands behind George’s back and staring up at him. “You know what I mean?”

George tucked a little of Matty’s hair behind his ear, running his fingertips down Matty’s neck and resting his hand on Matty’s shoulder, then leaned forward and whispered, “You’re mine.” 

He kissed Matty, just below his ear and then again and again until he reached his mouth. Matty parted his lips and George slipped his tongue in, flicking it gently against Matty’s and then away, closing his mouth and holding still against Matty’s face. His soft movements were met with Matty’s hand, firm on his neck, and a rough tangle of teeth and tongues as Matty kissed him back. It felt like a game only they knew the rules to, a crawl followed by a sprint. Matty leaned away and asked, “Should I wear this tonight?” tugging at the hem of his worn t-shirt. George slowly shook his head No and Matty peeled the shirt off. “Then you shouldn’t wear these either,” Matty said and undid George’s pants, pulling them all the way off before climbing back into his lap, legs spread, knees at his hips. “I want to stay close to you,” Matty said, falling against George’s chest, one hand on his shoulder and one hand dropping to his lap to stroke George’s dick. “You’re already hard, I like that.” Then, “Do you want me to shut up?” 

“Never.”

“Ok.” Matty moved with hesitancy, stroking George in a teasing way, testing what he liked, searching his face for even the slightest response. He found it, a tiny quiver, an exhale, and he leaned forward to kiss George, tasting him deeply and murmuring, “You smoked without me.” Tongues pressed together and then parting, “What else have you done without me?” 

He moved his fist faster, a bit rougher against George’s head and this time it wasn’t a subtle pulled face but a low groan, a guttural encouragement. Matty buried his nose in George’s hair and breathed in, filling himself with the earthy scent. “You haven’t showered. You’re dirty.” He sucked George’s lower lip into his mouth, mirroring his hand’s movements and pulling hard. “You smell so good.” His hand was growing slick with George’s wetness, making it easier for him to be coarse and quick. 

Breathing hard, he ran his hand down the front of George’s shirt. “You’ve been wearing this for four straight days, did you know that? I knew that.” He licked up George’s neck and kissed him, letting his tongue run over George’s lip. “It looks very nice on you, but I think it’d look better on me. Take it off.” George’s eyes glazed over and he shrugged the shirt off his back. Matty gave his dick a quick thrust then let go and said, “Put it on me.” George pulled the shirt over Matty’s head, threading his arms through the sleeves and straightening out the hem. Matty’s small torso was drowning in fabric, but when he moved his fist back to George’s dick he found he was right, it did look better on him; George was desperately pushing his hips up, begging Matty to let him finish. “No, not yet,” he said. 

He leaned in so that his lips brushed against George’s ear and, stroking George very gently and very slowly, he whispered, “Just looking at you like this makes my tongue swell and my mouth water and my lips shiver. Do you know what you taste like? Those croissants from the shop on Rue de Seine. Warm and light, the kind of thing you want to eat twice a day until you get fat.” He paused to kiss George’s neck, biting a little and pressing his tongue into the mark left behind. “I’ve measured myself against you. Your shirts hang off my shoulders and you have to stoop to kiss even the very top of my head, but my mouth was made for you, George. My tongue is every bit as much as you.” 

Matty moved his mouth to that tender spot on George’s neck that made his breath short and his chest flush and he asked, lips just touching his skin, voice filled with a provocative uncertainty, “Do you like this?” and he sucked at George before he could answer.

“Fuck, Matty, I’m so close.”

“I want you inside. Will you cum in my mouth?”

Through gritted teeth and from somewhere faraway, “Mhmm.”

Matty moved to his knees, between George’s legs, an even tighter space made to accommodate him just so and he took George in but not in the same rough show of bravado he put on before. Sweet. Matty worked carefully so each touch was meaningful and when George opened his eyes and caught the look of total concentration on Matty’s face he couldn’t hold back any longer. Matty swallowed with a satisfied gurgle. 

He moved back to the couch, sitting alongside George, resting his head on George’s shoulder and tracing his fingertips along the inside of his arm. “Stay like this, ok. Just for a few more minutes.” George nodded, too drained to say anything aloud and much too drained to resist. Though minutes earlier he’d felt possessed by an urge to say anything he thought to George, that spirit had vanished and the questions were back, bubbling just under his skull. _What are we doing, Matty?_ He couldn’t answer so he’d distracted George. _We’re doing it, again. The thing where we fuck each other but don’t talk about it._ George leaned over and pulled Matty by his waist, lifting his slouched shoulders to get closer to Matty’s face. “Not now. Later,” Matty said. He gestured to George’s shirt, “I’m not giving this back until then” and he stood up abruptly, disappearing into the venue’s bathroom. 

That night George took the stage shirtless. The review in the local paper accused them of leaning too hard on rock star tropes, citing the drummer’s needlessly bare torso. Perhaps he could have borrowed something from the prancing lead singer’s closet, the writer suggested, his shirt was two sizes too big, but that’s what you get when you dress your ego not your body. Matty laughed to himself and took a screenshot with his phone. He dragged his portable typewriter from where it was stowed in a back corner of the bus and began two letters: one to the fans and one to George. Both were titled, “Love Me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm starting to allude a little bit to the IRL timeline (the "Love Me" riff and the "Love Me" fan letter) but this isn't meant to follow the band's narrative, really. Also, I forgot to mention anywhere in the nothing I wrote about Chapter One that this will always be from Matty's perspective. Anyway, hope you like it.


	3. but

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Matty's world turns dreamy while things with George get more intense.

_I think it was in that loud bar we kept going to even though we agreed it was awful and we’d never come back. The jukebox only had about five songs and at first we hated all of them but by that night we were dancing together to whatever played. School had just started but it still felt like summer, especially in there, where someone’s elbow was always pressed into your side or someone’s drink was always about to slosh on your shoes. It was hot that night. You came round to mine and we smoked and stared at the ceiling until finally I couldn’t take it anymore. I was burning for you; my own skin felt foreign, a size too small. I had to get out of my bedroom so I said we should go to that terrible little bar and at first you said no, very slowly and your eyes were icy and faraway. I wanted to get rid of you, to get rid of us both, anything to make it stop. I grabbed your hand and pulled at your arm. “Sit up, please, George, don’t let’s waste the night,” I said and even now I remember it exactly because I learned you’d say yes to anything I asked for if I added “please, George” and because I watched you try to hide a smile. You will never hide a smile from me._

_I pulled you into the center of the bar and made a scene of us. I remember each little glance, each tiny touch, every single movement and every word spoken because I wrote them all down inside myself, feeling nostalgic for the present, romanticizing the future. I needed everyone to see that I am all yours. My sad eyes, my crooked smile, the obscene way I shake my hips, they belong only to you. One of our friends put on a slow song and everyone else sat down but not us. We were the centerpiece of that whole fucking bar, like some priceless crystal chandelier hanging from the ceiling of a rundown flat. I threw my arms over your shoulders, wrapped my fingers round the back of your neck and laughed. Then we kissed each other. I was so surprised because_ I _thought I was going to kiss_ you _, I thought I was really going to do it, but I had only finished the thought when your tongue was in my mouth._

_“I think.” I know. I know it was there. I probably should’ve thought, “They can all see us! What will our friends say?” Later, I lied. Said we were just messing around, said it was the tequila. I was scared of what we’d done. Not scared that anyone would care or that they did care or what it meant about me but scared that I’d let you fall into the place where I always lose people. I don’t know when that kiss ended, if it ever did. The next thing I remember it was morning. I saw you next to me, shivering under a bedsheet, and my head pounded, just fucking pounded, and I thought I was going to cry. I couldn’t even believe I’d fucked it up so badly._

_For a while, we sort of made it work. It felt like sleepwalking and I kept begging myself not to wake up,_ just ten minutes longer, please, Matty, _and I’d pull you close to me and in my head I’d promise you everything. I was sure I had only two choices: run away like the coward I knew I was, taking my certain destiny in my own two feet, or let it surprise me whatever cruel and stupid thing I did to hurt you. So I ran, and everywhere I went, there you were. There was, after all, no choice. Run away or stay, same thing. I can’t believe I said it was that bar. Remember when you ran through the toliets? I loved you the second I laid eyes on you._

//

On a freezing cold night in Amsterdam, icy sidewalks, snow caked to the gutters and scraped up against the sides of buildings, the light so dark it glowed blue in the pre-dawn, Matty wandered, smoke unfurling from his lips in silvery clouds. Lost in his thoughts he realized he wasn’t even sure what time it was, if it was after the show, like he thought a minute ago or if it was, in fact, before the show. He’d come from some room, a bar, maybe, or a restaurant or a shop and everyone was drinking wine and toasting. He couldn’t quite remember where or why; he was pissed. He’d met a girl there, they’d both stood staring out the window until finally he laughed and asked her what she was looking at and she told him, “your reflection in the glass.” He asked the girl if she knew him and she said she did, a bit, she’d recognized him. He nodded and asked her where her plastic cup of wine came from and together they headed to the hosted bar in the back of the room. 

She’d seemed spectral to Matty, so convenient and so attuned to him that he might be hallucinating. “There is someone,” he told her. “He’s always understood me before I’ve understood myself.” His mind felt like two different dogs gnawing on the same bone. One wanted to get inside him, the other wanted to escape him. The girl told him these dogs would eat each other if he let them and that he already knew what to do. 

“You don’t need to think about it anymore. Stop thinking and you’ll do exactly as you’re meant to.” She invited him to her apartment; her friends would be there, they could stay up, they could never sleep again. Exhaustion was key, tire the mind for clarity. The fantasy was bigger and sillier each time she presented it and Matty said yes and yes and yes until everyone left and then he said no and she wished him well. Drunk and alone he took off for he wasn’t sure where. The venue? The hotel? He looked around for the first time since he’d hurried outside, hood up and head down. The shops were all closed and the street was empty. Late, then. Post-show. Back to the hotel. Matty imagined some kind of mythological storm or natural disaster swelling behind him as he walked, that it wasn’t just his life or George’s life he’d ruined, but all life, that he was the very end of days walking down a frozen city street. A harbinger of doom, destruction with a pulse. _There are some things love won’t allow and I’m one of them_ , he thought.

His pace quickened, there was no point in drawing this game out any further, denying himself the satisfaction he craved under the pretense of self discovery. He’d been gone for hours, his fingertips were numb against his cigarette, and instead of diffusing the tension of desire, he’d only made it stronger, unbearable. George was in their hotel room, he was asleep, every 90 minutes or so he’d snore very delicately and very briefly -- like some tiny, imaginary forest animal -- and roll over, his toes were just dangling over the edge of the bed, just poking from underneath the bedspread, and, because Matty had waited until George headed to the showers after the show to shove all of George’s underwear in the bottom of his suitcase and because he’d sent the suitcase up to Ross’s room just to be sure it wasn’t heard from again until morning -- George was naked. 

Matty skulked through the hotel lobby, drummed his fingers impatiently against the mirror in the elevator and stuck his keycard in the reader backwards three times, but there, bathed in the glow from the open doorway, the air around him all thick and strange and hazy, was George; finally. _Intellectual foreplay_ , Matty thought, _I wasn’t clearing my head, I was filling it, filling it full with everything I remembered and some things I made up_. George was curled on his side, facing the middle of the bed and Matty climbed in next to him and laid flat on his back, his arms folded over his chest, staring at the ceiling. Sighing softly, though still asleep from every outward appearance, George loosened an arm from under the covers and wrapped it around him. _He’s dreaming_ , Matty thought but then George pulled at his side, trying to move Matty towards him. He turned over to face him and George mumbled through a curtain of not-quite consciousness, “You’re here.” He put an arm around George’s waist and wormed in closer, wrapping a leg over his thighs. “I’m always here,” he whispered into George’s mouth, sliding his tongue against George’s as punctuation. 

Matty kissed George slowly, feeling him grow more alert and aroused, his mouth more responsive, his breathing more staggered. He let the kiss end and found George, eyes open, smiling serenely at him. “There’s something I have to do. Right now,” Matty announced, indulging his usual reckless impulsivity, and he reached across George to turn on the nightstand lamp. In the light, Matty met George’s gaze, found his eyes wide, striking a precarious balance between hope and fear. Instead of putting George at ease, Matty just smirked and yanked the blankets off him and scraped them onto the floor. “What happened to your shorts?” Matty asked, arching his heavy brows with impertinence but refusing to look him in the face as he rearranged George’s legs so that one hung over the bed, foot on the floor, and the other was bent at the knee, foot on the mattress. 

“Dunno but pretty strange you should ask that,” George accused. Matty shrugged and, admiring the view he’d made for himself, peeled off all his clothing. “I want you to see me, too” he said and George nodded. Though the slightly confused look in his eyes still hadn’t faded completely, this was Matty. George relaxed. 

He lowered his face between George’s legs, announcing on his way down, “I want you really hard” and then took him in his mouth and sucked him in into his throat. He moved like this, up and down, cheeks hollow, a soft, wet space for George to fuck into, until George started pawing at the bed sheets and twisting his hips up. In a strange hotel, in a strange city, taking control of George in a strange way that he was never entirely sure wasn’t an uninterrupted dream, Matty couldn’t help but notice the way the air around them vibrated. Maybe it was lust, the reckoning of their profound need for each other and they way it overtook all rational thought. Maybe the lightbulbs were different in Europe. It was a barely perceptible shift from minutes earlier in the hotel hallway but Matty believed it was real, and whatever it was insisted he concentrate, absorb everything George offered him. Maybe he was dreaming, that would make the morning easier. 

Hearing George’s breath come in quick pants, Matty pulled away and replaced his mouth with his hand, stroking his dick. He cocked an eyebrow and said “I know what--” not bothering to finish the sentence he started and sucked George’s balls into his mouth, moving his tongue in firm circles. Satisfied he’d teased George long enough, he pulled away slightly. “Now it’s my turn,” he rasped, and without veering his eyes from between George’s legs, he flicked his tongue against George’s ass.

“Are you--” he gasped, the question melting into a low groan. “Fuck!” George arched his back in excruciating pleasure. 

Matty toyed with his ass a little then pushed his tongue in. His sense of gravity felt twice as strong, a magnetic charge that drew him in, wet and hot and intense. Matty sucked and tongued George, curling himself inside and pressing up where George wanted it most. His lips were soft and gentle, his tongue firm and pointed. George’s hand flew to Matty’s head, pulling a handful of hair loose from his top knot and fisting it tightly. Matty wrapped one arm around George’s thigh, holding it still, pressing his fingers hard enough to bruise. He pushed his tongue in deeper, his face buried in George’s skin, so consumed he could barely breathe. 

His lips and chin were coated in spit, his jaw sore. Matty moved slower, pulling his tongue in and out, dragging it for effect, so turned on by the sound of George crying out and begging for him. He wanted to share himself with George, to guide his body with his tongue and his lips; he wanted to savor every taste and smell, to drown there, overwhelmed by the way George tightened around him and his slightly sour taste. He angled his eyes up and watched George’s eyelids flutter, his breath rapid, a flush gathering on his chest. Matty wasn’t ready to give into him so easily. He pulled out and cooed, “You really like this,” grinning up at George mischievously. 

“I know,” through eyes shut tight and followed by a soft moan.

“Oh, fuck off” and he moved his tongue back, teasing and flicking. 

“Fuck!” George cried out and pressed his hips up. Matty grabbed them with both hands and shoved his tongue inside, eating him up. 

Matty felt George’s body pulse with orgasm, tensing around his tongue, and he gave him a last slow stroke before pulling his face away. Sitting up and resting on his heels, Matty reached for George’s legs and pulled them around his thighs. He ran his hand through the cum splashed across George’s stomach, smeared it over his palm and then handled himself with rough, quick strokes, fucking into his fist. He angled his hips forward, putting on a show for George’s benefit.

Matty’s eyes were shut tight, his lips slightly parted, the inside of his mouth catching the light and sparkling. His eyebrows sunk just slightly and he whimpered and moaned, a fringe of black eyelashes dancing as his mind projected a series of images against his darkened eyelids. 

“Slower,” George murmured.

Matty’s eyes blinked open, broken from his fantasy. “What?”

“Move your hand slower. Like this,” George said and loosened Matty’s fist, holding him by the wrist and sliding his hand gently up and down. 

Matty’s dick throbbed and he moaned softly. Pumping himself loosely a half dozen times he gasped, “Can I go faster now?” 

“No. Stop touching yourself and put your dirty fingers in your mouth,” George answered and Matty did as he was told, licking up the taste of George’s cum mixed with lingering cigarette smoke. 

“Please” he begged between sucks, unsure of what for -- George to finish him off, George to let him finish himself off, George to tell him what to do next. Matty’s eyes closed again, head tipped back, smooth neck exposed. 

“Open your eyes,” George demanded. “Look at me.” Matty opened his eyes and saw George spread out on the bed, shoulders against the headboard, one long arm folded behind his head. The skin on his torso was exceptionally taut and the shitty, dim hotel light splashed over his chest catching the lingering flush of orgasm. George reached out his other hand to the back of Matty’s thigh and moved upwards, a feathery touch that ran over the small curve of his ass and down to the middle of his leg and back up again. Matty’s eyes followed, staring intently at the pattern of hearts and moons that formed George’s peacock tattoo. His vision felt electrified and the splash of colors glowed neon and 3D against George’s warm skin. A shiver coursed through Matty’s whole body.

“Please,” he moaned again, looking back at George’s face. 

“No,” George said, eyes stern, lower lip so indelibly pouty that Matty lost his rhythm, hand slipping out from between his lips. 

“Please, George,” Matty whimpered.

George held Matty’s thigh tighter, pulled it towards his chest. “Kneel over me,” he instructed and Matty fell slightly forward so his knees were almost in George’s armpits and his ass was resting on George’s chest. George moved his hand from behind his head to touch Matty’s dick, stroking up and down, dragging the fingertips of his other hand over Matty’s thigh, finally stopping and cupping Matty’s ass and holding him still. “I’ll go faster now, but don’t cum until I say so.”

Matty let out a wet moan as George pulled his fist tighter and brought him closer. His little gasps were coming shorter and shorter and he fought the urge to squeeze his eyes shut tight and let his tongue roll out of his mouth.

“On my face,” George said, thumbing him gently, parting his lips and pushing his tongue out so it caught against the tip of Matty’s dick each time his hips rocked forward. Matty cried out, too in thrall to George to form words. 

His body shook with release, cum spilling into George’s mouth and on his chin, running down the sides of his face and to his neck. Matty was panting and breathless, fighting to stay upright when something took hold of him and he snapped forward, pulling George’s face to his and shoving his tongue in George’s mouth before he could swallow. Matty lapped at his own cum and George’s spit, finally releasing George long enough to let him breathe but then kissing him again, this time more gently, more appreciatively, less selfishly. 

“You liked that,” George parroted him.

“I know,” Matty groaned. He pressed up against George’s side, pulling his arm around him and resting his head on George’s chest. Matty sighed, eyelids heavy. He felt George run his long fingers through his messy hair as he fell asleep.

//

In his dream the room was lit minty green, a shade he might describe as alien or biblical if he saw it in his waking life, but in this space, the one Matty recognized as theirs, it radiated comfort and familiarity. He looked around at the long leather couch and up at the wooden beams that criss-crossed the ceiling and panned the walls lined with framed prints from famous exhibits and photographs he knew he’d taken and saw the massive mahogany bookshelves, and thought _Oh, this is our home_. George stepped through the adjacent doorway and the light flickered and the room turned pink with his presence. He stood behind Matty, wrapping his arms around his chest and pulling him in tight, resting his chin on the top of his head. It felt so intimate, the embrace so natural, that it was as much as part of Matty as his shadow at morning striding behind him. “Do you like it, babe?” George asked. Matty tipped his head up to see George smiling at him. 

“It’s ours?” Matty asked. He felt George nod his head. “Forever?” George squeezed him tighter and Matty smiled, a deeper sleep taking him in its undertow, making the dream room blur at the corners. “I never want to leave,” Matty said, and it was true. He felt something pulling at him, warping the walls and the floor and the ceiling, but he was still desperate to stay. “Do you love me?” Matty asked. 

George’s voice came to him, whispering in his ear, “Matty. Matty. Babe,” and giggling. He leaned over Matty’s curled body and scratched softly at his head. “C’mon babe, wake up.” Matty squeezed his eyes shut tighter and let go an annoyed whine. 

George moved in closer, planting tiny kisses along Matty’s jawline until Matty shrugged his shoulder up and mumbled, “Stop. Let me sleep.” Soft afternoon light streamed through the thin curtains and painted the room a muted pink. The world around them was quiet and still. The heater thrummed on, a low white noise that disturbed the pristine silence slightly but reminded Matty that he was real and alive. George kissed Matty’s forehead and nuzzled his nose in Matty’s black curls. 

“Cigarettes and,” George paused for effect, “is that horseshit I’m smelling?” he laughed. “Wish I could bottle it.” He kissed at Matty’s bare shoulder fervently, and then straightened back up, tracing the outline of Matty’s silly Newcastle tattoo with his index finger.

“Aw, shut up, George. You’re really one to talk. Leave me alone.” Matty pulled the bedspread over his head. 

George moved to the end of the bed and flipped the blankets up, exposing Matty’s tattooed feet. 

“George, I swear,” came Matty’s muffled response.

George let out another giggle and tickled at the bottoms of Matty’s feet, laughing harder as his legs went flying, kicking at George’s hands. 

“Stop it, you fucker!” Matty cried indignantly. His heart pounded and his stomach spun. Was George flirting with him? Had this always been flirting or was it only flirting now? He let his legs go limp, curling his knees back to his chest in the hope that George would leave him alone. Burying his face in the pillows, he smiled, knowing full well George would never leave him alone. George reached up for the covers and tore them off Matty. He didn’t feel cold or displaced, but Matty longed for the feeling of something on top of him, something protecting him. George climbed into the bed and rolled Matty onto his back and sat on his chest. He turned Matty’s face from where it hid and ran his thumb over Matty’s pink lips. 

“Matty wake up right now,” George said, affecting a tone that was no longer playful and silly, a tone that ached with desire. 

“Why?” Matty asked, eyes still pressed shut.

George leaned forward and took Matty’s face in both his hands and kissed him hard, pushing his tongue against Matty’s and moaning quietly into his mouth. 

Matty sighed, “It’s too early.”

“No it’s not,” George said, something pent up lacing the edge of his voice. He kissed and bit at Matty’s neck. 

“Are you hard?”

“Yes,” George grabbed Matty’s hand and moved it between his legs.

“Ever find your underwear?” Matty asked, cracking an eye open to catch George’s face.

“I knew you had something to do with that!” George shouted and Matty pulled him back in and kissed him quiet. 

“Shh. Shh. I’m still sleeping,” Matty said, his hand still carelessly stroking over George’s zipper.

“No, you’re not,” George said, a taunting lilt taking over, rocking his hips into Matty’s palm. 

“George. What d’you need me for? Fuck yourself and let me be.”

“No,” George said, kissing softly up Matty’s neck, “I want _you_ to fuck me. Now,” he whispered into Matty’s ear. George undid his jeans and slid them off his hips, moving Matty’s hand back to his dick. “How much I want you,” he said softly as Matty’s fist closed around him. Matty’s eyes stayed closed but he felt his hand grow wet with George’s arousal. George rocked his hips back and forth, fucking into Matty’s hand. He considered folding his hand under his side and insisting George wank himself off when Matty heard a rustling sound and the snap of a plastic bottle cap flipping open. George slid out of Matty’s fist and lowered himself over Matty’s rapidly hardening dick, grinding into him. He took Matty’s hand in his and Matty felt a cold slickness spill over his fingers, some of it landing on his stomach. George took his palm and moved it under him, pressing his ass into Matty’s fingertips. 

“Fuck, George,” Matty moaned, finally opening his eyes and looking up, wide awake. “Inside you?” George exhaled slowly and nodded, sliding his large hand over his dick slowly and loosely, working carefully to do nothing more than maintain himself until he was ready for Matty to fuck him. Matty curled all but his middle finger into his palm and pushed it into George, watching his face twist. George gripped himself tighter but kept his fist still, moving his hips instead, pulling back and asking for more. Matty pushed a second finger inside him, sliding the two gently in and out, focusing intently on George’s ragged breath and asking, “Is this good?”

“Do what you did with your tongue,” George winced and Matty bent his fingertips up into George and watched him gasp and jerk forward. “Fuck. That’s so good. Keep going,” George panted. They breathed short, warm bursts into each other while Matty continued opening George up, moving gradually and deliberately. He pushed a third slick finger in and George lowered his face and kissed Matty deeply, licking his lips and tongue. George played with himself almost absentmindedly while Matty worked, and he could feel George’s knuckles dragging against his stomach in an uncertain rhythm. Maybe because it was was so George, the Drummer of him, but the strange time signature he used on himself made Matty wild with lust and he slid his fingers out of George’s ass and rubbed the lubrication over his dick. Wet and hard he pushed up into George, just barely inside of him, holding his hips with both hands to keep him steady. 

“Don’t tease,” George was barely able to croak. 

“Are you sure?”

“Please, Matty.”

Matty closed his eyes, certain he couldn’t look and last both, and pulled George’s hips down as he pushed his own hips up. George groaned loudly, louder than Matty had ever heard him, a sound that he couldn’t identify as totally of this world, but one that sent all the blood in his body surging to his dick regardless. “It’s too much, George. I wanna cum.” His breath came in heaves and chokes, uneven and rapt. 

George rode Matty slowly, one hand on the side of his neck, fingers curled tentatively, the other reached for Matty’s slippery hand and moved it to his dick. “Touch me.” Matty nodded and let out a deep breath. He focused all his thought on George. His hand trembled slightly but he managed to find something close to his familiar grip, building tension from subtle and light touches to rougher movement, then back and then forth, eyes locked on George’s, watching his pupils spiral. 

“Talk to me again,” George whispered, leaning forward slightly for a better angle, a rumbling groan catching in his throat as Matty pressed into him, sparks shooting through his entire body, curling his toes. “I like that.”

Matty closed his eyes tightly, put a hand on George’s neck and pulled his face close. He spoke softly into his ear, “Being inside you like this feels like having a whole galaxy all to myself. This whole entire world and every world beyond it is suddenly open in front of me and all I want to do is spend an eternity counting the stars.” Matty thrust his hips slowly and bit into George’s neck, just hard enough to leave a faint pink mark behind, “I want to burn when I cum inside you. I want it to feel like I’ve wandered too close to the light, like I’ve been careless and you’re making me suffer a little, so tight around me, using me up.” 

“Cum, Matty,” George moaned. “Cum inside me, I want it.” George pulled away from Matty, both chests slick with sweat, the heart at Matty’s center shining like a glossy photograph, and continued grinding his hips. Matty opened his eyes and wrapped his small hands around George’s arms, digging his fingertips into the firm muscles.

“You’re so strong,” he said, voice full of wonder and his cum spilled out as a wide eyed gasp spread across his face. George looked from Matty’s hands, the delicate, dirty fingers covered with his musk, to his soft stomach and the trail of dark hair drawing his gaze downward. Matty felt George tense around his sensitive dick and his cum was suddenly hot against his stomach. 

George groaned, “You’re so beautiful,” and eased Matty out slowly. 

//

Jet lag or sex lag, the rest of the band slept while George and Matty lay cuddled together on the bus couch, fingers intertwined, whispers and giggles ricocheting off the walls. Matty looked at George’s hand wrapped around his and felt his stomach kickflip. 

“George,” he said. 

“What?” George asked, kissing his cheek.

Matty turned his face upwards, eyes dark saucers, eyelashes blinking and eyebrows knitted, and asked, “What happens when we go home?”

“What d’you mean?”

“Will we wake up?” He turned his head back down to hide his uncertain emotions, running his thumb over George’s index finger, hoping to find the touch soothing enough to quell his tears. 

“Are we dreaming?”

“I think I am.”

//

_The night that you broke your shoulder, I sat with you while you cried and I wanted so badly to hold you but even the slightest touch would have been too painful so I was simply there. I was crying, too._ What’s happened? _You asked me and I looked at you as best I could and promised you that everything would be ok._ I promise, I promise _, I kept saying it over and over again because it seemed to soothe you, just a little bit. I knew we were going to hospital but no one had told you and I didn’t want to tell you because I didn’t want your broken bones to be real until they absolutely had to be. I told you to take a deep breath, we were just driving and everything would be ok,_ I promise _._

_At A &E they wheeled you away from me, you were too shaken up to walk. “I’ll be right here, I won’t go anywhere, as soon as they say I can, I’ll come back and see you. You’ll be fine, you’ll be much better._ I promise _.” And I let my fingers just touch the back of your hand and I waited for you to wince or to flinch but you didn’t and I thought, “Oh. I’m in love with him.” I’d never let myself think it before. I knew I loved you, of course, I knew that, but I thought I loved you like a sweater for Christmas or walk your dog when you’re sick or make you coffee when I make myself coffee kind of love. What I realized then was that my fingertips would feel singed every time I touched your skin, no matter how gently, no matter how briefly. It would be like this mark of identification -- my fingerprints -- would dissolve on contact with you because when we are together there isn’t me or you, there is only ever us._

_They told me your shoulder was broken and they sent me to put a bag together for you. You were done with touring for months and they’d already booked you a flight home. I went back to the bus and started gathering your things. If I might be allowed the tiniest bit of levity here, you are a_ mess _. I was never so happy that you’re such a mess as I was in the very early hours of that morning because it meant I got to touch every single thing that belonged to you and decide its import and pack it in your suitcase. I packed most things. I threw away some empty foil packets -- you don’t need to sleep with those, you know. And I set aside a pair of underwear, worn, unwashed, to keep for myself. I wondered if they still smelled the same as I remembered from school. I wasn’t ready to let you go. I cried and folded your shirts neatly so they wouldn’t crease. I don’t even know how I remembered to do that; I don’t fold my own shirts so carefully. It took a very long time because each item I moved made your bunk a little emptier, a little less you._

_I found your passport and I flipped it open to the photograph. There you were, hair half blonde and unkempt, distinctly your own. You’d never stand to look like someone else. Your eyes were creased into scheming half-moons, like you’d just thought of a really dirty joke. Your lips showed the slightest trace of a smile. I told you. You’ll never hide a smile from me._

_I love you, George._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Listen. Matty _always_ gets fucked. George is a beautiful man and a gentle soul, he should get fucked, too.


	4. don't

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Matty & George through time and paradise

The room is enveloped in a darkness more beautiful than the sun, saturated navy blue with streaks of serene violet. Moonlight floats in through the bay windows and swirls around the hardwood floors. Their laughter precedes them, dancing inside like spirits, entwining with the silky glow and waiting for them there. The key turns in the lock, the door swings open, Matty’s curls shake, his head falls back, his eyes shut, chatter and giggles spill from between his crooked teeth and rosy lips. He stops and turns around and George surrounds him, whispers in his ear, cheek pressed to cheek, a hand on the small of his back and a hand on the side of his neck, and Matty can’t help but swoon into him. George rests his chin on Matty’s head, breathing in the scent of fragrant peach blossoms and burning blonde wood, caressing the back of his black suit jacket. They sway together like this, holding each other, living like sound and air, blissfully inseparable. Their feet rock from side to side, Matty’s words catch in George’s throat, Matty’s breath warm against George’s thin shirt, the one covered with island flowers and palm trees. Waves roll over the shoreline and the linen curtains rustle in the gentle ocean breeze. The night, the city, the bungalow, the moment, each suspended in the clouds and frozen in time.

“A couple years ago, we were on that endless press day in Australia. Same questions over and over again, felt useless and bored both, asked for a rest and got a coffee instead -- you know” Matty pauses because George _knows_ how the interviews felt; Matty pauses to pick his head up from George’s chest, to take George’s hands in his, to feel their warmth against his fingertips. “They finally gave us a break. Just minutes, because we were so desperate for a fag we were twitching. They let us out and we stood on the sidewalk and the wind was wild. I tried to light one, but I couldn’t get the flame to catch so you cupped your hands and I looked at you and you were staring right through me. It was so intense I shivered a little.” Matty brings George’s hands to cup his face and kisses the thumb that reflexively traces over his lower lip. “Then you lit your cigarette off mine and you shot your eyes up and you smiled. You shined, really. And I lost part of myself then. In the best way. Because I knew that part I couldn’t keep with me would live there forever. Live there with you.” He sighs. It’s a bit dramatic, he knows, but he can’t help himself. Swallowing hard, he asks, “Did you love me? Is that why you looked at me that way?”

George’s voice comes low and faint, “Yes.” And even though the apartment is very dark, Matty feels his gaze trained on him and he turns his eyes up to meet it and he lets George stare right through him. “How could I not? You flinched when I touched your hands. I thought you were cold.” Still holding Matty’s face, George kisses him softly and says, “You looked so sad.”

//

George stuffed his laptop in his bag and wound the power cord around his hand, his back to Matty. Journal already packed up, a bit fidgety at the end of the workday, Matty watched George hunched over his things. It was still hard to recognize the feeling inside him as one he could act on -- not a trespass of some unspoken boundary line, not the certain destruction of a nearly lifelong friendship, but a natural urge to touch George and feel he was still there, still real. Matty ran his hand over George’s lower back, fingertips lingering on the notches of his spine, nudging his shirt up with each subtle movement. It was a small test, of how long he could go unnoticed and of how much alabaster skin he could expose. The power cord was tucked away, the zipper slid closed, the shirt halfway up George’s back, and Matty’s hand less tentative with each pass. In that same strange way that he wasn’t always sure about these small gestures of affection, it took Matty an extra second or two to realize George hadn’t stood up because he wanted Matty to keep touching. Matty pushed his hand up between George’s shoulder blades and with a hoarse voice, from a day of singing or from a day of longing behind a sheet of glass, said, “Come here. Come to me.” He left his hand on George’s back as he straightened up and George mirrored the embrace, pulling Matty in and lowering his face to push his tongue between Matty’s lips. It was a languid kiss and Matty melted into it, losing all sense of his surroundings to his craving for George. As the kiss ended, Matty nudged himself closer, tugging at the waist of George’s pants, but he turned away and picked up Matty’s backpack and handed it to him. 

“Not here,” he said, slinging his bag over his shoulder. 

He kissed Matty again, quickly, but it wasn’t enough to stave off the narrowed eyes or the stern lip or the smarting, “Why not here?” 

George took Matty’s free hand and said, “Let’s go,” and led him out the studio’s side door and into a narrow, enclosed alleyway. As the door clicked shut behind them, George leaned against the wall of the building and pulled Matty close. The air was warm and lush, and Matty couldn’t tell if the faintly wafting smell of sandalwood was real or imagined. George stroked Matty’s lips and ran his hand through his hair, taking a fistful between his fingers and brushing it away from Matty’s forehead, exposing the subtle architecture of his face. He leaned into Matty and kissed his cheek, moving his hand to palm the front of Matty’s pants and whispering in his ear, “Here.” They shared a long kiss that Matty didn’t recognize as initiated by either him or George. His usually ardent affections subsided in something that felt egalitarian, his tongue in George’s mouth and George’s tongue in his mouth in such a way that neither could rightfully claim ownership and instead of belonging to one another they simply belonged. 

Matty’s jeans were a loose fitting pair, something he deliberated on while getting dressed, deciding as he did in favor of a more casual and less labored look so that his outfit would not be mistaken for a disguise. Jeans and a polo shirt, though not his truest self-expression, did nothing to compete with the yearning in his eyes. George reached to undo Matty’s pants but stopped and pulled away and with a gentle laugh he said, “Let me guess.” Matty bit his lip and turned his eyes up to George with a feigned naivete, knowing exactly what was to follow.

“No underpants?” George asked.

“Which do you want it to be?”

“No underpants.”

“Go ahead then.”

George slowly unzipped Matty’s jeans, peering down as he peeled them away from Matty’s body, and then shot him a wild grin. Matty twisted himself against the wall and George shrugged his pants down to his ankles and lowered to his knees, pushing Matty’s shirt up and kissing down his stomach to his dick, running his tongue along its length and then moving to his thighs, kissing between them and sucking whenever they betrayed a tender shiver. 

It was only the first week of writing and recording, the first week in LA, but Matty could feel the end date hanging over him. Paradise was nothing if not impermanent. A month earlier the thought of making an album, drowning in sunlight and blue skies, seemed a distant future but time stole it for the present and each successive present loomed -- not as cresting waves on a far horizon but as water washing over his feet, inevitable. Now and now and now and now. George’s mouth returned to his dick, a teasing swirl to keep him eager. Matty felt his stomach twist, his desire to stop time overwhelmed him and as George wrapped his lips around Matty’s dick, he placed a hand on George’s face, running a thumb over his cheekbone, and said, “Don’t let me cum when I want to. Make me work for it, George.”

Matty pushed his hand back and into George’s loose waves, playing with his hair and admiring the way the sunlight streamed between the buildings and fell across his cheeks and the bridge of his nose. George moaned against his dick, moving Matty in and out in a gentle current, sucking him into a steady rhythm only to break it with a slow, wet kiss. Matty was quiet, thoughtful and meditative, concentrating on absorbing George’s every lick and suck, framing them in his mind as a pristinely kept room he could return to any time, at will. He moved his hand to George’s thick shoulder, squeezing it as he let a low groan escape his lips and his breath hitched, coming in gasps. “I really never thought we’d do this,” he managed to pant. His eyes were pressed shut -- watching George’s face in the brilliance would bring him too close, wind the clock forward instead of holding it still. George pulled off, moving to rest his jaw by kissing Matty’s head softly, working his fist around the length and slowly stroking. “I look back on all those years when I felt guilty just dreaming of this and all those other lovers I only ever half-loved and it looks like a photograph someone left on a windowsill. The colors are so bleached, their outlines are so faint.” A moan caught in his throat as George took him in, letting him slide back into his throat. “But every thought of you is so vivid. I remember everything. Every time you--” the words wouldn’t come. George had grown eager, sucking hard and pulsing his tongue against Matty, bringing him right to the edge before remembering his earlier request and ceasing all movement. 

Both faces were shaded with frustration. “I won’t touch you again until you finish your thought,” George said, a trace of solemnity taking the sting out of the tease. 

Matty closed his eyes again, let his head fall back against the wall. “Every time you slid your hands under your shirt and rubbed your stomach and I could just see the top of your underpants from poking out from your jeans,” he groaned, almost unable to spit out the words. “Fuck, I want you so much.” The second his sentence ended George’s mouth was hot and wet around his dick, but Matty willed himself to keep talking. “I thought I’d felt love. I thought I’d been fucked. I thought I’d given myself over and lost myself in someone else, but all that time I held something back. All that time I waited. I saved part of me and now that little bit of soul I clung to is inside you. It feels like a beginning. A first time. Stop, stop,” he said, gasping sharply. 

George pulled back and looked up at Matty, watching him take a long, slow breath, but still unable to pry his eyes open. Trembling slightly, his eyelashes fluttered and he looked down at George, meeting his fiery gaze and said, “Let me cum now, please.” George pushed his tongue against Matty, refusing to break eye contact and Matty accepted this intimacy. Staring into George’s wet face, he moaned, “I gave you my virginity,” his cum filling George’s mouth. As George slid back, Matty’s knees buckled slightly and he gripped the wall for balance. “I meant it, it’s true,” Matty half mumbled as George stood upright, pulling Matty’s pants up for him, doting on him by buttoning and zipping them. 

“Come on, then. I’m buying you dinner,” George smiled and wrapped an arm around Matty’s slight waist. 

“That’s so cheese, George.”

“Don’t care, really,” he smiled and squeezed Matty tighter. 

//

Padding over the hardwood floors into the light-filled living room, George found Matty sprawled over the couch, a cigarette dangling from his lip, a sugary cup of coffee growing steadily colder balancing precariously at his bent wrist. Matty’s jeans were a pair belonging to George, so oversized they barely clung to his slim hips. He was in one of his preoccupied moods, shutting away the outside world and leafing through his journal. George was always free to enter Matty’s private thoughts, to join him, no matter how solitary and brooding he appeared. “What’ve you got?” George asked, stretching his arms over his head and bending slightly backwards, his stomach brushing against Matty’s bare shoulder and the back of his head before he relaxed and looked at the lines of text spooling across the page. “You,” Matty murmured quietly. 

George draped his long arms over Matty’s skinny shoulders and softly kissed the side of his neck, moving upward toward his ear and then burying his face in Matty’s black curls, breathing in deeply. His hair smelled of every second of the past three days, alive. George gave him a last kiss on the top of his head and moved to the kitchen for a glass of water. “This fridge is insane!” he called to Matty, “Got prepared smoothies in there,” his voice getting louder as he walked back to Matty. “Hey,” George tousled his hair, distracting Matty enough that he tilted head up to face George, his wide and serious eyes met with a gentle smile. George took the cigarette from Matty’s mouth and watched him exhale slowly then lowered his head to kiss him, tasting the smoke on his lips. “I’m heading to bed,” George said, taking a drag. “Come with me?” 

//

“White cotton bedding. This is fucking luxe,” Matty crowed to the still deeply sleeping George beside him. Sun streamed on the sheets and apart from the warp of Matty’s voice the only sound was the ambient noise of trees rustling outside their window. He burrowed violently under the blankets and cried out, sound muffled, “That’s it, we are not leaving bed today.” Just as immediately as he’d sunk in and made up his mind to stay there, he popped up and rolled out to put coffee on. 

Setting a cup on the nightstand next to George’s head he cooed, “See how good I am?” and climbed back onto the massive mattress. George remained out cold and Matty set down his own mug and nudged George’s back. 

“Don’t make me say it,” he lilted. “Don’t make me do it.” He moved both hands to George’s ribs. “This is your final warning.” George remained soundly asleep, totally unaware of Matty’s escalating threat level. “Wake up George! Wake up! Wake up!” he shouted, digging his fingers mercilessly between George’s ribs. George thrashed, begging him to stop. 

“Fucking hell, Matty, what is wrong with you?” George grumbled when Matty finally relented. 

“I made you coffee. Drink it now, it’s still hot.”

“You lived too long as an only child,” George yawned, rubbing the heels of his palms into his eyes. “This is nice,” he reconsidered, sipping the coffee. “You’re mental, but this is nice.” For a moment the two of them simply laid there, half propped up on pillows, eyes focused on the middle distance, lost in the silence. 

Finally, Matty stirred, scratching at the side of his face, and offered, “I don’t want this to end.”

“You keep saying that, you don’t want it to end or you don’t want to wake up.”

“Cos I don’t,” Matty said, very seriously. “Right. Ok. Hold me and I’ll tell you what I mean,” Matty said. He needed George to accept what he was feeling unconditionally and he needed to face away from George while putting it into words. George pulled him under his arm and Matty snuggled into his side. “Kiss?” he turned his face up and George’s lips met his, soft and warm and Matty smiled to himself. 

“Remember how strict your parents were?” he asked.

“Christ, Matty. I’ve told you. They were not strict. You just didn’t have the same rules everyone else did.”

“Alright then. Remember how much time you spent at mine? Remember when we were, what, 17 or something, that spring?”

“Oh, is that when you got the blue light for your room?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, I remember,” George nodded. “God, of course I remember, that was a very memorable time. Making out with local superbabe Matty Healy in his own bed. Why do you think you’re the only one who lived through that?”

Matty chucked a hand back at George’s shoulder. “Shut up, I’m explaining myself,” he grinned.

“Alright, you can answer that one, too, take your time.”

“Ok.” Matty sighed and inhaled deeply, “What I remember is that no one seemed to much care what happened in my bedroom and I had this feeling like we were in some portal to another dimension or something. No one cared because the room wasn’t even real and we didn’t even exist when we were in there.”

“That’s imaginative.”

“ _Please_ shut up, I’m trying here.” Matty collected his thoughts again, “But I was too old to really believe that completely, so each night you were there I’d fall asleep thinking to myself ‘wake up first, wake up first’ and I’d picture myself waking up before you, waking up before dawn, even. And it worked. I’d jerk to sometime in the middle of the night and I’d flip the stereo on like a nightlight and I’d just,” Matty paused searching for a polite euphemism but nothing came, “I’d watch you sleep.” 

George raked his fingers through Matty’s hair, pulling his curls back from his face, gathering them in his fist and then letting them fall loose and repeating. 

“I’d think these thoughts that, I don’t know, they don’t seem that mental now, but back then I couldn’t make sense of them. I’d look at you and tell myself ‘Oh, there’s George. That’s my _best_ friend.’ I wanted us to be friends, so badly, because that seemed manageable but I knew we weren’t _just_ friends. _Just_ friends was a little story I told myself to feel better.” 

Matty waited to continue and after a pause George added, “I used to think that, too. When you were skateboarding, like. You’d race away from me and I’d feel this pain. Worry. I guess. That you’d not come back. You know, what did _that_ mean? Dunno. Mostly I didn’t care about what it meant too much. What did it matter? We were happy, weren’t we?”

“But for how long? We’re happy now but for how long? Having a whole secret world to escape to was the high ideal, but if I couldn’t have a safe place to hide us in, I could at least steal some time back from the future. I’d have this -- sometimes I’d stare at you for hours if I was really upset, but sometimes I’d see you were there and I’d feel better and go right back to sleep -- however much time it was, no one could take it away from me, not even you.”

Matty turned on his side and rested on his elbow, still pressed close to George, and said, “You’ll always be my best friend” and he wound his fingers through George’s and dragged his thumb over his knuckles. “But this is so easy and I want it to always be easy and I know it won’t be. It can’t.” He laughed bitterly, “Remember -- fuck, course you do -- back when I kept telling interviewers that I had to live in the moment? Think I might’ve got that from you, even. Guess I just like this moment so much I’m not that interested in the next one.” Matty took George’s face in his hand and leaned in to kiss him. 

George pulled Matty on top of him, their tongues entangled, their naked bodies warm and pressed together everywhere they met. It felt like the ultimate expression of safety and comfort and intimacy to Matty, a closeness that nothing -- big or small -- could interrupt. The sheets and blankets all around them were a bright and reflective surface and their lightly tanned bodies rested on top, sand inside of seafoam. Floating on the spray from the tallest wave, Matty felt like nothing could touch them there, he pictured the wind whipping through their hair and George’s hands taking his hands and clutching them tightly. He felt part of himself disappear and he felt satisfied that their time in this room would go on forever. 

Matty’s hair crowded into his face and fell over his eyes, obscuring most of his expression as he leaned into George, absentmindedly pushing a hand into his hair and enjoying the feeling of his fingers snagged in the tangles. “You could have said you left your comb in Denmark,” he teased. George didn’t answer but his eyes flicked from side to side, taking Matty in and Matty pulled his hand back and moved some of the hair from his line of sight. “We’re sharing it this time, aren’t we?”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m trying to keep this memory. You are, too.”

“Yeah,” George admitted.

“Promise me you’ll remember this forever. Please promise me, George.”

“We’re in bed together, not coming up with banking passwords,” George laughed, but Matty’s eyes remained hazy and distant. It wasn’t a joke to him. “Matty. You’re being so serious.” Matty nodded, eyes turning at the corners and lips pouty. George sighed, “I remember as much you do. The only difference between every then and now is that you asked. You always could have asked, you know.”

“No. I couldn’t,” Matty lamented, a bit miserable.

George met Matty’s amber mood halfway, tracing his fingers over the curve of his shoulder blades and then sliding down to the divots in his lower back. “Life moves. You can’t fight that. Well, _you_ can.” George smiled and Matty leaned in to kiss him again, an unhurried kiss that sunk into the radiant sunlight and the warm bed sheets and their bodies, one and the same. “You want a world of your own to hide us in but I don’t want to hide anywhere. And I’ve already shared my life with you. I don’t have a second soul hidden somewhere. You’re inside me, too, you know?” It wasn’t a confrontation, not at all. George knew Matty’s worries and his words gifted Matty an assurance that he’d never lead him astray with uncertainty. They were a reminder that when he kissed Matty and sent him into this forest he had every intention of coming with him. 

Matty nodded, his eyes wet -- a fact he didn’t attempt to conceal from George. The tears released something inside of him, gave him permission to free some part of himself he kept chained and he picked his hips up and moved his hand to George’s dick. 

“This is what gets you off? Alright, I guess,” George joked.

“Stop,” Matty managed a small giggle. “I just -- it’s different with you, George. I feel all messy and raw and I want to fuck you while I still feel this way.” He affected a haughty air and sniffled slightly, “It’s a new thing I’m trying, now are you into it or not?”

“Fuck,” George moaned as Matty thumbed at the cluster of nerves under his head. “I want you any way that you are,” George shook his head slightly and Matty leaned in to kiss him approvingly. 

He ran his tongue over George’s lower lip and said, this time all certainty, this time with a cocksure swagger that verged on smugness, “Your lips are chapped,” and there was no trace of a preening smile, no insecurity in the tilt of his head. His eyes bore into George’s face, the ceaseless monologue in his head suddenly, finally still. 

Without breaking Matty’s intense gaze, and with an understanding face that suggested, _Yes, I knew what you meant the first time you said that_ , George pulled Matty’s palm to his mouth and kissed it very softly, noiselessly, and said, “Thanks.” George stroked his thumb over Matty’s jaw and wrapped a long leg over Matty’s thighs, a feeling both soft and scratchy but overwhelmingly secure. “Will you fuck me now?” George asked and Matty nodded. 

Without disturbing George’s leg, Matty slunk down, kissing George’s chest, hands holding his sides firmly. “Sorry about earlier,” Matty whispered, stroking over his ribs and George huffed at the reminder. Matty continued down his stomach, down to the thick patch of hair, nuzzling into it and then running his tongue over George’s dick. He sucked softly at George’s head, flicking his tongue and listening for George’s little heaves and moans. 

“Eat me out,” George pleaded, body writhing against the bed. 

“You’re eager,” Matty smirked and pushed his tongue against George’s opening. He was warm and musky and Matty moaned softly. 

“You’re eager,” George spat back, punctuating the jab with a little whine. Matty nodded, his hair brushing against the inside of George’s thighs. George scratched at Matty’s head, whispering, “Fuck, you’re good at this,” and Matty pushed his tongue inside him. He slipped it in and out, getting George wet and relaxed before reaching for the bottle in the nightstand drawer. He slipped two slick fingers inside George and then with his free hand, pulled George’s hand down so it cupped the side of his hand and his wrist. 

“We’re sharing it,” he said, working his fingers in and out, dragging them against George and feeling George’s hand tighten around his. George pushed his hips into Matty’s hand, eased and receptive. “I’m going to fuck you now,” Matty announced and smeared his wet hand over his dick, fucking quickly into his fist and then lowering himself between George’s legs.

He pushed in slowly, savoring the still new, still blindingly hot feeling of being inside George. One day he’d watch what it looked like to slide in and out of him, but then his eyes pressed closed instinctively. The room went quiet and still. Matty’s movements were slow and controlled, for minutes the only sound was their breath, until Matty asked, “Want me to talk?”

“Yeah.” George nodded quickly. “Be dirty.”

“Do you like my dick?” Matty thrust slowly.

“It’s,” George paused and his face crumpled the way it always did when he played drums, “I do, it’s lovely,” he groaned.

“Lovely,” Matty cackled. 

“It’s nice!”

“Do you like how it feels?” Matty moved gently, carefully fucking the last inch in and out. 

“Yes.”

“I like best how it feels when I pull almost all the way out,” Matty slid his hips back, “And you’re just clinging to what’s still inside you.” Matty pushed his hips forward and repeated. “I always want you to feel that way about me.”

“Fuck,” George dug his head back into the pillow.

“Oh, he likes it,” Matty smiled. “You know it’s not a competition, but I think I like your dick a bit more than you like mine.”

“Impossible.”

Matty moved his hand from the pillow just above George’s shoulder, leaned back and toyed with his dick. George groaned loudly. “You’re gonna make me cum if you keep fucking me like this.”

“I like the look of it in my hand,” he said, rubbing his fist over George’s head admiringly. “The pink and the cream. Like the way light looks in dreams.” Matty closed his eyes for a moment and then opened them. “It’s the softest skin on your body.” He tightened his grip. 

“Shit, Matty!”

“Cum so I can taste you again,” Matty begged. George’s whole body arched into Matty’s fist, cum spilling onto his stomach and the sheets. Matty brought his hand to his mouth and slipped two wet fingers between his lips. He rocked his hips gently, closed his eyes, and without thinking let his body shake with orgasm. 

//

Matty pulled George’s hands to his face, bathing in their milky sweetness.

“Are you being romantic?” George asked with a little giggle.

“No!” Matty scoffed, moving George’s hands so they covered his entire face, hiding his gentle smile. _Yes_. 

//

 

“Let’s fuck off early,” Matty purred into George’s ear, leaning over his shoulder and watching him fiddle with three different programs at the same time. 

“Hrmmm?” George mumbled, stringing a few consonants together in the form of a question.

“We’ve worked hard; I wanna go shopping. Please, George?” Matty asked. 

George turned his head to the side, looking Matty’s face over to gauge how badly he wanted to call it a day. Matty watched his eyes turn up and down and up, his tongue running over his teeth, and then, without answering, he turned back to the laptop and continued working. 

“You’re going to give me a sulk,” Matty warned.

“Give you?” George snorted. “Go write some lyrics, babe.”

“It doesn’t work that way!” Matty cried. Realizing he’d missed the mark, he tried another approach. Stroking his hand through George’s hair and sighing softly he whispered, “I need inspiration.” George turned around to look at him again and Matty waggled his eyebrows and ran his hands down George’s chest. 

“I thought you needed new clothes,” George drolled and turned back. 

“Do you think you’re very funny? Having a laugh?” Matty sputtered. 

“Yes, I suppose I do,” George said, without turning around.

“I suppose I do not. Quit teasing me, we both know you’re not going to let me walk out that door alone.” 

“Tell me where we’re going,” George stalled.

Matty resumed combing his fingers through George’s hair, resting an elbow on his shoulder. “Vintage. I’m going to find you five, how would you put it, _sick_ ‘70s blouses that will be utterly inappropriate to wear while sweating it out behind your kit.”

“You want to shop for, how would I put it, _dinner_ blouses, Matty?” 

“Yes, I think you have the idea exactly, now please, enough of these slings and arrows, love, let’s,” Matty paused to put on a cowboy accent, “get a move on.” 

George giggled and said, “You’re too much,” pulling Matty’s face to his and kissing him. “Give me 30 minutes to finish this.” 

 

The shop was posh, curated, no mothball smell or overstuffed racks, a small boutique that time appeared to have forgotten. George stopped in front of a floor length mirror propped up against the wall to examine his appearance. Matty let go of his hand and George tugged at his hair and adjusted his sunglasses, managing to crack a very slight smile in modest approval. “Think you look pretty cool today, yeah?” Matty quipped from behind.

“I might pass for cool.”

“You might,” Matty smirked and walked off toward the back of the store. Matty prided himself on a certain decisiveness and thoroughness while shopping -- traits that primarily benefitted him as it took him hours to sort through a store but only seconds to pick what to purchase. He carefully scanned a rack of shirts, pulling a couple hangers and marching back to George.

“For you,” he said thrusting his arm out and pushing the blouses against George’s chest. 

“What’s this? Flowers and trees?” George scoffed. “Says, ‘I’ve smoked a bit of weed’ or something, doesn’t it?”

“You’ve trusted me before with less reason. Go and try it on, I don’t think they started making shoulders so broad until ‘86 or ‘87. It’s your size but see it fits.”

“Yeah, fine. Won’t be anyone else wearing it. That’s a point.” 

Matty stood outside the drawn curtain and snapped the hair tie on his wrist for three, maybe four, seconds then slid into the tiny dressing space with George.

“I can change clothes without help,” George protested when Matty moved his hands to do up the buttons on the shirt.

“I want to see if it looks as good as I imagined, don’t be sour,” Matty tsked without looking up from his hands. “There,” he patted George’s chest. “Don’t ever do the last three to the collar.” 

Matty backed away so George could take a look. He shook his head slowly. “Dinner blouse.”

Matty wrapped his arms around George’s torso and rested his head against his back. “Do you think the last man to own this shirt was so in love?” 

“What you mean?”

“It’s just. Maybe it was you before. Maybe I bought you this blouse already and gave it to you for your birthday or just cos it looked so good on you. And maybe you wore it for me even though you thought it was quite silly cos you wanted to make me happy. And then I was happy. Happy cos I was in love with you.”

“In another dimension.”

“In another lifetime. I think that maybe we are bound to each other for an eternity. Don’t you ever wonder how you know things about me before I know them about myself?”

“It’s cos you’re predictable,” George laughed lightly. “No. You’re not. Dunno, reckon I’m just a good guesser,” he shrugged.

“Identity is so infinite. I mean, not to sound like you after the fourth, but anyone could be anything, it’s completely endless. Whatever I am, you’ve already figured it out.”

“I didn’t know you love me.” 

“Forgive me that one,” Matty bristled and bent over to pick up George’s discarded t-shirt from the floor.

“Not like that, don’t,” George said, tugging at Matty’s arm for him to stand up. “It’s. You’ve never said you love me.”

“Let it go, George,” Matty sighed. “The shirt is perfect, please buy it.” He slipped back out of the dressing room and disappeared onto the sales floor. 

//

Matty refused to let himself admit why this dinner felt different. It certainly wasn’t their first, not even their first since landing in LA. They’d eaten at Nobu before, too, several Nobus, in fact. Still, as he picked out a black suit, buttoned his shirt to his collarbone and then unbuttoned it to show off the small bit of chest hair he’d grown, he’d felt it -- it was now. There was no never.

Across the table, George was decidedly less done up. A worn pair of black jeans, a white tank top, and over it the island print shirt Matty picked for him. While dressing, George had asked “ _Is_ this a bit sick?” second guessing his earlier assessment. Matty bit his tongue and squeezed George’s ass, leaning up for a quick kiss. 

Matty took his hand under the table, George’s long fingers falling lightly into his palm, Matty running his thumb over George’s knuckles. “You’re great, you know that?” he said, head tilted just slightly, not in a smirking way but in deference to George, in total earnestness. 

“Matty,” he gently cut him off. 

“Don’t,” Matty said softly. “You know it’s true,” tears turning his eyes glossy. 

George looked down at his lap. Not impatient or embarrassed, but thinking. Slowly, carefully. He looked back to Matty and said, “You don’t have to say it.” 

“A few weeks ago I wrote you this letter. It’s somewhere, still. My suitcase or my backpack. But I couldn’t give it to you because -- I’m not sure. Because I didn’t want anything to change and it felt like things would if you read it.” George smiled and squeezed his hand.

Matty’s eyes rolled to the ceiling and stuck there for a moment, his thick fringe of eyelashes fluttering and damp. They turned down to George, meeting him across the table, a distance that felt non-existent. The whole room faded. It was just the two of them, suspended in time. “I feel sick,” Matty muttered. “I’ll always need you. I’d probably die if you left. Be with me, George. Don’t ever go.”

George leaned across the table and kissed him. “OK,” he agreed. 

“That’s not awful?”

“No.”

“Then,” Matty sighed, “I love you.”

“I know, you said it two days ago.”

“But this time I want you to know.”

George laughed. “I knew before then, too.”

“When did you know?”

“Probably like 12, 13 years ago or something?”

“How did you know, then?”

“Oh, right. We were walking home from school and you turned to look at some spires and bumped into me and I asked what you were doing and you didn’t answer, just stared at me like I was grotesque.”

Matty flushed. “That obvious.”

“Yeah. And I knew again when you were stood behind Adam while he took a picture of me. He put the camera down and said, ‘Cute!’ and you made this face at him like he was taking pictures of drowned cats.”

“Don’t rub it in, George,” Matty sniffed.

“I knew is all. And then I’d wait until I felt like I could kiss you.”

“If you knew, why did you wait?” 

“Because you didn’t know,” George smiled gently.


	5. start

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> trading intimacies brings Matty & George even closer

It’s George he watched, George leaning in to read the wall text with his arms crossed in front of him and a museum brochure pressed into his side, George with his shoulders hunched toward the frame and his spine curved toward the ceiling, George with his knees slightly bent and his pants rolled at the ankle. It’s in George’s ear he whispered, “Get your eyes checked,” and it’s George’s voice that whispered back, “Don’t talk. I’m reading.” George’s hand reached out and found his without looking. George took his wrist, tangling their arms together, and held it to the center of his chest where his breath rose and fell. George’s fingerprints were all over his body, still warm everywhere he’d pressed his hands that morning. 

He ached for that touch again; here he could only watch. He closed his eyes to the massive room, the brilliant French paintings, the guards stood silent and still. He couldn’t see anything that mattered as much as George. 

//

The hardwood floors met in overlapping zig-zags and the walls were a dull mauve and somewhere between the two hung the Rouen Cathedral in morning light. George lagged behind him, just inside the room, thoughtfully admiring a different blur of soft colors and short brush strokes. Matty read. _Everything changes, even stone_. There were twenty of them, twenty cathedrals or twenty paintings, and the one before him seemed almost to disappear in places. The faint sun faded the facade to a dove grey, the same grey of an old memory that you’re not quite sure belongs to you. It didn’t impose so much as refuse to be defined, the hard edges melting into shapeless texture. He felt the paint dripping off the canvas and seeping into him, that early morning light casting an odd pall on his own thoughts.

He reached an arm behind him and grabbed for George. “Come see this one,” he said, tugging at the sleeve of his jean jacket. George leaned forward to read the painting’s date and description and Matty leaned with him, following along, quickly re-reading the text and committing it to memory. _Permanence and mutability_. He turned the words over in his head. _Everything changes, even stone_. George stood back and Matty crowded his peripheral vision, watching his face move as he took the painting in; the way his eyes narrowed, the slight crease between his eyebrows. Had he seen Rouen Cathedral -- not the Rouen Cathedral Monet painted, not the painting that hung before them, but what Matty saw?

“Do you think the light looks the same?” George asked.

He had seen Rouen Cathedral. 

“No,” Matty sighed and rested his head against George’s shoulder. “I think everything changes, even the light.” 

“How does the light look today?” George asked.

Matty considered. “Like you,” he said. “Warmer.”

Matty felt George’s head nod. “The light is lighter,” George said with a playful lilt in his voice and turned a deadpan face to Matty.

Matty nodded back, “Today it is,” he said and George wrapped a long arm across Matty’s back, pulling him closer and holding him tighter. “Don’t think I missed that terrible play on words, George,” Matty said, turning away from the painting and nuzzling his head in George’s side. “I’m just too happy to laugh at you.”

George tipped Matty’s head up and kissed his forehead, then turned his face slightly and kissed his mouth. Matty felt strangely electric; he thrilled to the touch to be kissed by George, even chastely, in the middle of the Getty’s West Pavilion. It wasn’t that he expected to lose interest in George, but that he expected the opposite of numbness was comfort. Once he’d filled the void in his life all the world’s sensations would stabilize in some harmonious way, each day washed with gentle bliss. 

He faced the cathedral, blinking quickly as though it might sharpen the persistently hazy image. _Why did I think that?_ he wondered. His brief relationships -- and as they filtered through his mind, _relationship_ was too formal to describe them -- always captivated his attention, monopolizing his time and his thoughts, but the more intensely they began the faster the flame burned downed the matchstick. He tore through people like pages in a diary, converting them for creative fuel, songs and lyrics and albums, knowing that the band would keep him and George together while he sorted himself out. He was buying time and now that he’d cashed it in he expected something akin to retirement. 

But it was nothing so easy. George’s arm dropped from Matty’s side and Matty reflexively reached for him, hooking his fingers inside the cuff of his sweater, thumbing over the fabric, not ready to let him go. “You hungry?” George asked, “I’m starving.” He smiled softly and rubbed his hand over his stomach. Matty’d spent half his life hungry, daydreaming of a record contract, a number one album, a hit single, a sold out tour, an arena, _fame_. And as he’d crossed every line out, each a heavier toll than the last, he realized it was the desire he craved. He was sure that sharing his love with George, sharing the fullest extent of his love for George, would do something to diminish his desire, to mute his daydreams, and yet there was still nothing he wanted more. 

Matty darted out of the gallery, veering left around the corner and he felt George’s hand squeeze his shoulder, pulling him back. He turned his head and George silently pointed to the sign directing them to the exit. Matty paused, as though frozen, then smiled and followed a half step behind George out through the glass doors. George’s hand on his shoulder tripped some invisible wire in his brain. His skin felt hot and nervous, his mind jittered and ran backwards to a night on the tourbus, only months ago and otherwise immemorable except that George had put his hand on Matty’s shoulder and Matty had turned to see George looking at him. Though the sensation of George’s innocuous touch was visceral, Matty thought this moment would fade, blend in with all the others and become indistinct. But it came back to him with the exact same shape as it first presented itself, not a memory but a return, whole and true. It was the need to meet George’s gaze and to kiss him, nothing more.

Outside, the soft light had ceded to something brighter, something intense and close. Under that almost white light, Matty reached for George, wrapped his hand around George’s neck, his thumb pressed against George’s jaw, and he kissed him. 

As the kiss ended, he held George’s face close, whispered “I still love you,” and kissed him again. 

//

In the late afternoon, they stood in separate corners of the master bedroom, attempting to pack up the past month with all the disorganization and disarray of a couple not yet ready to move house. Various objects were strewn about the floor and Matty spent more time pacing between the closet and the chest of drawers than he did folding anything into his suitcase. From behind him, George reached over his head and pulled a pair of sneakers from the closet shelf. “Are you ready to go home?” Matty asked and knelt down over his pile of things without waiting for the answer, his question only meant to break the silence between them. 

“I never felt I wasn’t home. I want to be where you are,” George said, pulling Matty up from his crouch and lazily kissing him. 

“Are you plying me with cliches and kisses? I like that,” Matty interrupted George’s affections. “It’s a lovely sentiment, truly beautiful and I’m touched, but I was hinting at something more practical.”

“What?” George asked, confusion passing over his face.

“I don’t know where I’m supposed to live. Might just stay on the bus ‘til I die, keep things simple.” He laughed at himself, but it was obviously forced, a half-hearted attempt to paper over his worries with nonchalance. 

“Don’t laugh. You’re asking to live with me again?” 

“Properly speaking, live with you _still_ ,” Matty said, gesturing to their room and all the belongings strewn about. “Just formalize the arrangement a bit.”

George laughed, shaking his head in mild dismay. “I didn’t think you’d ask. I expected you to send your wardrobe and suitcase of papers to mine and I’d find you in the bedroom, rearranging the pillows so the soft one was on your side.” He paused and smiled, taking Matty’s hand in his, “This time don’t tell me you’re meant to grow up and have your own place, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Matty answered softly. He kissed George gingerly, “I never wanted that. I thought what I wanted, I couldn’t have.” 

George’s eyes flickered back and forth and back over Matty’s pouty lower lip. “It still felt terrible when you left.” He pushed his thumb between Matty’s softly parted lips, tugging it against his bottom row of crooked teeth and pulling his mouth open. George leaned in, pressing his tongue to Matty’s and kissing him deeply. 

Matty pushed George onto the bed and climbed on top of him, legs splayed by his hips and tugged at the hem of his sweater. “Off with this,” he mumbled, half to himself, and pulled the sweater over George’s head, smoothing his messy hair from his face. He leaned in close, their faces nearly touching. “I want something else now,” he said, voice low and trembling on the last word. “I want to kiss you here,” Matty said, drawing his index finger across George’s lower lip. He replaced his finger with his mouth, their lips softly connecting. “And here,” he said, his finger following the curve of George’s collarbone. He pressed his lips against the warm skin, listening for George to release the breath he held. “And here, and here, and here,” Matty said and he kissed a nipple, the center of his sternum, and a protruding hip bone. 

Matty sat up and traced a finger lightly along the waist of George’s jeans, watching his muscles tense and his skin shiver. He unbuttoned and unzipped the pants, sliding them off George’s thin hips and dropping them carelessly on the bedroom floor. Now that he had George naked, now that the two of them dangled on the precipice of indulgence, Matty backed off George and lay next to him. “I want to watch you,” he said, eyes dark and sharp enough to pierce. “I want to see the way your face changes when you get what you want. Touch yourself,” he demanded. There was something rough in his voice, in the aloof way he took George in. There were none of the intense, shifting glances of arousal. Instead, Matty appeared able to observe George completely, or maybe that what he wanted wasn’t flesh. 

This serrated edge was compelling and George shoved his fingers in his mouth, sucking them in and out until they were slick with spit. When he let his hand fall from his lips he turned to Matty, matching his darkness, and said, “Tell me what you see.” Matty nodded in agreement and George moved his wet fingers over his dick and Matty watched it, hard and thick in his hand. 

“Don’t make a sound,” Matty cautioned and George nodded. 

George bit his lip. Matty could tell he was playing with himself purposelessly, unable to lose himself in the act, to shake his free of his inhibitions, but the way he kept himself aroused suggested he wasn’t disinterested in performing for Matty, just unsure of quite where to begin. It was Matty’s job to guide him and he spoke softly, coaxing George, “You’re warm all over, the blood in your body is surging to the surface, stopping just under your skin and turning you the sweetest pink.” George’s eyes wandered from his dick to Matty’s face, his eyelashes fluttering.

Matty continued. “You want me to watch you. Not to watch you,” Matty corrected himself, “You want me to see you, to see the way your back arches with every upstroke, to see the way your face twists when you hear my voice, to see you force your eyes open when you want to close them and melt into your own touch.” Matty watched George’s face pull, saw how desperately he wanted to moan. 

“You suck on your fingers to keep yourself quiet,” Matty said, gently directing George’s movements without touching him and George slipped two fingers between his lips. “You suck on your fingers the way you want to suck on me,” Matty said. George strangled a cry. 

“Your heart pounds in your chest and your breath is short and choked. You keep rubbing your fingers over the same spot. Up and down,” George’s chin thrust back and he held his hand still, as though waiting for Matty to approve his release. “Your body is glowing like you’re possessed with something, when you tremble and the light catches you, you look cut from Carrara marble.” Matty’s voice was hoarse and cracked, he wanted to tear George’s fingers from his mouth and kiss him desperately. He watched George’s stomach, the way the muscles flexed, tense and on the verge.

“Up and down,” Matty’s words were thick and his eyelids were heavy. “Give into me,” he moaned and George gasped, cum covering his abdomen, flush covering his cheeks and chest. Slack jawed and moving with pure instinct, Matty swooped down and he dragged his tongue through George’s orgasm. As his eyes rolled to George’s face, he felt strong hands grip his shoulders and pull him hastily. 

“Get over here,” George murmured, kissing him hard and frantically undoing Matty’s pants. “I’ve never wanted to fuck you more,” he said, rolling on top of Matty, sucking and biting at his chest. 

George tugged Matty’s pants to his knees and teasingly kissed around his dick, eliciting a whispered “Fuck!” as Matty thrust his hips up, begging for George to put his mouth to better use. 

He swirled his tongue around Matty’s head, listening closely to Matty’s little panting gasps and then stopped suddenly. “You were right,” he smirked. “This was just what I wanted to do to you.” 

//

On the plane, Matty lost color. He was wan and drained. He kept running his tongue over his dry lips.

“Are you hungover?” George whispered, careful not to to disturb the sleeping band and crew members around them.  
Matty shook his head _no_ and inhaled deeply, twitching uncomfortably in his seat.

“What is it then? You look about to spew.”

“I’m not ready,” Matty whispered back after a long silence.

George took his hand and squeezed it tightly. “Yes, you are,” he said and pulled Matty’s head to rest on his shoulder. “I know you.” 

// 

The back door slammed behind Matty and he clumsily stumbled into the East London apartment, pulling off one of his boots with both hands, perilously close to tipping over and falling on the floor. The shoe yielded but not without struggle and Matty’s victory sent it flying down the hall, skidding to a stop next to the couch. The entryway was dark and Matty brushed his hand over wall searching for the switch to no avail. He mumbled to himself and then fell to his knees. “You alright?” George called from the the main room, his open laptop glowing against the apartment’s darkness. Matty picked his head up just quick enough to catch the look of vague irritation on his face. He didn’t answer George but wriggled out of his leather jacket and tossed it unceremoniously on the floor beside him. 

George’s bare feet padded over to the scene and he found the switch easily, flooding the small space with light. Matty was bent over, tugging off his other boot, the sock on his left foot mysteriously missing. Matty looked up to see George peering over him, laughing at the sight of him crumpled on the floor. “Why are you making such a fuss?” George tsked.

“Dunno,” Matty sighed. “I’m not even drunk, if you can believe it. I tried. They had this -- what do you call it,” he snapped his fingers in front of his face, “mezcal, which I’m told is fancy tequila and I gave it my all but I was so bored without you there. A room full of _Hello, love_ and _Album’s finished! Feels like a holiday for us!_ and no beautiful model-type around to tell me I’m acting like a cunt? What’s the point, really.” Matty huffed and rolled his eyes. “I think I’m making this racket so you’ll pay attention to me.” 

“Oh come on then, get up,” George feigned impatience, sticking his hand out for Matty. “Go to sleep and tomorrow will be better. Or something like that. My mum used to say it when I was smaller than you.” George led Matty by his shoulders to their bedroom and stood in the doorway, watching Matty fumble with his shirt, getting the sleeves twisted and his arms stuck above his head. As Matty writhed, George noticed a bruise on Matty’s chest. _His_ bruise. The faint outline of his teeth marked in purple above Matty’s nipple. Matty just caught the look of utter lust that passed over George’s face before George picked him up and tossed him on the bed, moving quickly to hook the tangled t-shirt over the bedpost, effectively tying Matty up. 

George ran his tongue over Matty’s lips, teasing him before kissing him slowly. Matty kissed back hungrily, thrusting his hips up and pushing his hard dick against George’s palm. He moved to the bruise on Matty’s chest, carefully running his tongue over its intricate pattern. “Did this hurt?” George asked, concern momentarily clouding his face. Matty shook his head _no_ and George quickly issued a perfunctory “Good” before teething the same spot, savoring the way Matty writhed with pleasure beneath him. He let go of Matty’s soft skin, sitting up and admiring the pained and destitute expression on Matty’s face. 

“Use me,” Matty pleaded, “I’ll do anything.”

George groaned, “You’re fucking hot when you’re desperate,” and roughly yanked Matty’s plaid slacks off. He stood at the foot of the bed and motioned undoing his own pants, working as slowly as possible, feeding off the way Matty’s body throbbed for him in his absence. Matty arched his back provocatively, trying to manipulate George into stripping down faster. His ploy worked and George was soon on top of him, hovering over his face.

“Give me your mouth,” George rasped. Matty moaned loudly and tongued at George excitedly, fighting against his makeshift restraints. Seeing him, feeling him so eager beneath him drove George mad and he pressed himself to Matty’s face. Matty reciprocated by working himself inside George, sucking at his sensitive underside, dedicated to giving George anything he craved. His tongue turned and curved, little gurgling noises issuing from his throat. Matty could feel George rocking himself into a predictable rhythm, knew George would quickly cum on his face if he kept working. 

As soon as Matty relaxed with satisfaction, George snapped his hips up and groaned, “I want you inside me now.” He pulled the small bottle from nightstand drawer and spilled the cold liquid on his fingers, purposely letting some fall on Matty’s stomach so he could watch him squirm. 

“Please let me do it, “ Matty begged. “Let me touch you.” 

George laughed roughly. “No,” was his short reply. The longer reply involved the look of satisfaction that spread over his face as Matty jerked with frustration.

Matty’s stomach lurched. He’d never seen George open himself up and the sight was intoxicating. He stared at George’s thick, long fingers sliding in and out of his body with total rapt attention. A low moan from George snapped his trance. “Let me kiss you then,” Matty negotiated. 

George smiled sweetly at him, leaned forward, stroking Matty’s soft curls and whispered, “No,” against his lips, pulling just far enough back that Matty’s attempts to capture his mouth were futile. He groaned and fell against the bed. “I’m going to use you now. Just like you begged me to,” George announced, grinding his ass against Matty’s dick. 

“Fuck,” Matty cursed, bending his hips.

“None of that,” George cautioned, holding him firm to the mattress. He teased himself with Matty’s dick, running a slick fist up and down the length, twisting his thumb at the tip and rubbing it against himself. George’s eyes fell closed, as though he was lost in fantasy and he told Matty, “I want you to keep your eyes open. Look at what I’m giving you.” As he had on their last night in Los Angeles, George murmured, “Tell me what you see.”

Matty groaned and took a deep breath, attempting to gather all his self control. “Ok,” he agreed and George pushed down, taking Matty’s soft head. “Fuck,” Matty cried out again, but he continued, “You’re fucking gorgeous, completely open, spread out over me, and it’s a wicked punishment that I can’t taste your skin.” He narrowed his eyes at George but his angst was quickly subsumed in the feeling of George taking him in slowly, bit by bit. He choked a moan back, biting his lower lip between his teeth. “I’m losing myself inside you,” he spoke, barely above a whisper, as George’s body met flush with his own, grinding against Matty’s hips. “Your whole body is tight, tense. You’re hard. Everywhere. Hard for me.” Matty let out a little yelp as George pulsed on his dick. 

George rocked back on his knees, taking Matty deeper and thrusting harder, gripping Matty’s thighs tightly as he fucked. Matty kept his eyes open but cried out, “Let me use my hands, let me make you cum.” His face was frantic. “I can’t hold back much longer, George, please.” 

His frenzy settled suddenly when he saw something familiar in the line of George’s body. “Oh fuck,” he whimpered and George shook, his warm cum settling on Matty’s chest. George dragged his fingers through the release and shoved them into Matty’s mouth. He lapped appreciatively and George buried his other hand in Matty’s hair, tugging his head back. 

“Cum for me, baby,” George moaned, breath burning against Matty’s ear. His skin prickled all over and he trembled, giving George what he needed. George pulled his hand from Matty’s mouth and rubbed it against his stomach. “It feels so good inside me,” he sighed absentmindedly. 

George reached over Matty’s head and freed his hands from the knotted t-shirt. He climbed off Matty and collapsed alongside him, wrapping an arm around his thin waist and holding him close, framing the smaller body with his embrace. Matty felt his hand against his head, combing through his dirty hair, his fingers brushing against Matty’s cheekbone and skimming the slim column of his neck. Both men were slick with sweat, exhausted. Matty let his eyes blink closed and mumbled, “Sing me to sleep, please.” 

George rubbed his palm in soothing circles over the soft flesh of Matty’s torso. Slowly and quietly, he began to sing Matty’s song. “I may not always love you,” he murmured and Matty felt George shake his head, he’d never stop loving him. A contented smile passed over Matty’s face. “But long as there are stars above you,” he continued and brushed the hair back from Matty’s cheek. “You never need to doubt it, I’ll make you so sure about it,” he trailed off as Matty’s breath settled. George leaned forward to kiss the tip of Matty’s nose and as he adjusted their bodies, Matty stirred, briefly awake.

“Switch pillows with me,” Matty’s voice came thick through the fog of sleep. Without asking why, George re-arranged the bedding, lifting Matty’s head and tucking his pillow underneath. “I want to sleep with the pillow you dream on,” Matty sighed. 

//

Matty shifted awake to the touch of George’s fingers stroking his face. He made a small noise of dissatisfaction and squeezed his eyes shut tight. George continued thumbing over Matty’s face, ignoring his protest. “About time you got rid of this, yeah?” he said, referring to the growth of stubble Matty affectionately called his _holiday hair_. “Makes you look a bit shit.”

Matty knocked George’s hand from his face, pulling the bed sheet over his head. “I’m sorry you don’t think I’m pretty anymore,” he snapped.

George laughed, “Oh no. You’re still very pretty.”

“Thank you,” Matty mumbled, half-forming the words. “Please go back to sleep.”

“Can’t. I’m awake,” George said, looking at the the small, warm lump curled under the blankets. He rolled over and laid on his back, still and contemplative while Matty tried to fall back to sleep. “Matty,” George said flatly, more of statement than a question.

“George,” Matty replied, more of a no than a yes.

He moved closer to Matty, fitting his body around Matty’s bent knees and bringing his face to the crook of Matty’s neck. Punctuating each word with little kisses he said, “I know how to wake you up” and he reached around to grip Matty’s dick. Matty stirred and turned onto his back, pulling George over him and resting his hands on his hips. 

Matty loosely draped his arms over George’s shoulders, then drew them back slightly, gripping both biceps with his skinny fingers. He grinned, shamelessly, “Dying to ride my dick again?”

George grinned back but climbed out of bed. “I want to do something else,” he said. He took Matty’s hands and pulled him upright, leading him to the full length, free standing mirror opposite the bedroom window. “You like to watch,” George said suggestively, nibbling beneath Matty’s ear. Matty whimpered. “So watch,” George said, dragging his tongue from the base of Matty’s neck to his jawline, then wrapping a hand around his neck and pulling it back, pushing his tongue between Matty’s parted lips and searching Matty’s mouth. As the kiss ended George jerked his shoulder up, tipping Matty’s head forward to face the mirror. “Eyes open,” George dictated and Matty’s eyelashes blinked softly, then parted. “From now on, you can nod _yes_ or _no_ ,” George said, making eye contact with Matty’s reflection. Matty nodded yes. George gripped his neck tighter. “Do you like this?” he asked, and though Matty’s rapid pulse and short, panting breath were all the confirmation needed, Matty nodded. George moved his free hand from Matty’s bony hip, up his stomach and to his nipples, flicking his thumb against one and then the other. Matty’s knees weakened slightly and he moaned. 

George stared into Matty’s reflection. “You’re so sexy, Matty. This is sexy, even,” he said, lifting his thumb from Matty’s neck and rubbing it against the stubble on his chin. Matty’s eyes crossed slightly; he’d meant to roll them but he was too engorged in the sound of George’s voice and the fingers toying with his body to properly convey his petulance. “The way you give yourself to me, expose yourself and let me explore you. I’ve never had that before now,” George said, and his hand trailed from Matty’s chest down his torso, gripping the side of his ass and kneading the flesh with his fingertips. He rubbed his dick from the small of Matty’s back to the curve of his ass, tracing a wet line on his soft skin. “Maybe I couldn’t have given it to anyone, either. But I want you to have me.” He stroked Matty, thumbing over the accumulating wetness and dragging it to the sensitive spot under his head. “You do. Completely. I love you, Matty,” he said and pulled Matty’s hand from where it rested, clinging to George’s forearm, and moved it to his dick, letting his own hand drift lower and softly squeeze Matty’s balls. 

“This is how I see you,” he said and watched Matty stroke himself, his fist moving in tight, sharp jerks. George held Matty’s neck tighter, savoring the papery gasp that escaped Matty’s lips and the wet groan that followed. George worded his last thought carefully. “See yourself,” he said. Matty thrust his hips into his hand and came hard, gasping for breath, on the verge of passing out. 

George released Matty’s neck and Matty turned quickly to face George, pulling him close and smearing his orgasm between their bodies. He kissed George deeply and appreciatively, holding his face in both his hands. He was too blissed out to form words; his kiss a substitute for _thank you_ and _I know_. People always told Matty they loved him. His mother on her Instagram account, his fans, through tears while waiting outside in the freezing cold for just a glimpse of him, his manager after skimming the label’s quarterly report. He’d lost sense of what the word meant, the feeling that went with it. He could feel it inside himself, the way he felt on the edge of spontaneous combustion whenever George’s eyes met his. That was love. It was contradictory to feel beloved and unloved simultaneously, but it was another of Matty’s unique paradoxes -- he simply hadn’t known _love_ until George showed him.

Matty dropped to his knees and licked the cum from George’s lithe stomach, the salt of George’s skin mixing with his own bittersweet taste. He finished cleaning George and moved to circle his dick with his tongue when George stopped him. “Not like that,” he said, rubbing Matty’s cheek and giggling.

He helped Matty up and led him to the bathroom. “Sit here,” he motioned to the toliet. 

“It’s cold,” Matty whined. George shook his head and placed a folded towel over the seat. Matty sat and looked over at George curiously. 

“I want to shave you,” George announced, taking the can of cream and razor from the medicine cabinet. He lathered Matty’s face and whispered, “Sit still.” Matty took in a deep breath and held it, his eyes flickering over George’s face. 

“I’ve never done this with anyone,” George said, very carefully and very slowly dragging the razor across Matty’s skin, adjusting and readjusting his stance. Matty’s eyes went wide in an attempt to take in George’s look of quizzical effort without moving his head. He made careful, short swipes above Matty’s lip, his breath a little short at the sight of Matty’s slightly swollen and bright pink mouth. 

He grabbed a washcloth and ran it under warm water and gently wiped away the stray shaving cream on Matty’s face, finally heeding temptation and kissing Matty’s sex-softened lips. When he pulled away, he stood up straight, bringing his hard dick to Matty’s willing mouth, feeling his warm breath across his sensitive skin. 

Matty, usually so eager and so ready, usually with George’s dick rubbing against the back of his throat as soon as it was in his mouth, instead took him deliberately, measuring his movements. He worked George over in increments, teasing first, his warm tongue tracing over every centimeter of skin. He licked so slowly even George found it agonizing, groaning loudly and curling his toes against the bathroom tile. Only after George’s dick was sufficiently teased did Matty close his mouth around the thick shaft, dragging his lips up and down, proud of the way the illicit image pulled curses from George’s throat. George was on the verge of madness, his hands in Matty’s hair, his every ounce of self-control holding his hips still and preventing him from fucking Matty’s face. Listening to his sweet pants and grunts, Matty conceded and sucked him into his throat, turning those small, breathless noises into a loud moan as he swallowed George’s cum. 

Matty stood, his spine straight and his chin turned up to George's face. He brushed a stray hair from George's face and for several moments the two stared at each other in silence. Matty spoke first, “I am still dreaming. With you, I never have to wake up,” his voice was hushed, his eyes steady and without their constant pleading cast. “I think that’s all I want.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> whoops sorry this took 3x as long as the other chapters


End file.
